Dr Andrew Delatolla

Profile

I am Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leeds and previously held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I was the former Chair of the LGBTQA+ Caucus of the International Studies Association 2020/2021. After completing my PhD in 2018 in the Department of International Relations at the LSE, I was employed as an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the American University in Cairo.

Research interests

My research interests centre on the intersections of race and sexuality in relation to statehood and state formation. My research examines these areas from international political perspectives of the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire) and through an international historical political sociological lens.

I have previously written on issues of state formation in Lebanon, using a Tilly-esque approach to understand the Lebanese Civil War as conducive to the state formation process; how civil war dynamics in Lebanon are reproduced in the post-conflict context due to general amnesty and power sharing agreements; how religion has been racialised from the nineteenth century to today; the historical importance of race in international relations; and how sexuality has been, and continues to be, used to measure global civilisational engagement.

My book, published with Palgrave Macmillan (2021), examines the relationship between European notions of civilisation and state making in Lebanon and Syria, arguing that the post-colonial state is a product of a standard of civilisation, one that has mobilised – and continues to mobilise – implicit and explicit racist conceptions of civilisation, development, and identity. I have also written on this subject for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies.

My current and developing project examines the relationship between statehood and sexual governance. It considers how social reproduction relies on structures of heteronormativity and questions the disruptive politics of queer radicalism.

I am also part of the University of Leeds Queer Area Studies Network and I am a researcher on the AHRC-DFG funded project ‘Transitions: Examining Changing Regimes of Sexuality in Post-Soviet Muslim Republics, 1985-2001’.

Recently published work

• Civilization (Elgar Encyclopedia of International Relations, 2025)

• A Global Phenomenology of Whiteness (Sociology Lens, 2024)

• Queer Conflict Research (with Dr Samuel Ritholtz and Dr Jamie Hagen; Bristol University Press, 2024)

• Listening to the Stories People Tell (Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2023)

• The Limits of Revolution (with Dr Joanne Yao, Acta Politica, 2023)

• Civilization and Statehood (OREIS, 2022)

• Challenging Institutional Racism in International Relations and Our Profession (Millennium, 2021)

• Race in Historical International Relations (with Dr Joanne Yao; Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations, 2021)

• Civilization and the Making of the State in Lebanon and Syria (Palgrave, 2021)

• Sexuality as a Standard of Civilization (ISQ, 2020)

• LGBTQ+ Life in Interstitial European Overseas Territories

Qualifications

• BFa, Drawing and Painting, OCAD University
• BA, Political Science, Concordia University
• MA, Intelligence and International Security, King's College London
• PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science

Professional memberships

• International Studies Association
• BRISMES
• BISA

Student education

I teach and supervise topics on sexuality and gender, politics, and history of the Middle East and North Africa. This includes topics on LGBTQ+ activism, queer and gender histories, colonialism and empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Palestine/Israel.

Research groups and institutes

• Gender
• Conflict
• History
• Politics
• Arabic, Islamic, Middle Eastern and North African Studies
• Arabic
• Queer Area Studies Network

Current postgraduate researchers

• Mahmoud S Elmasry