Maria Gloria is a Visiting Fellow at LSE.
She is the SOAS Middle East Institute’s Research Fellow. She lectured in International Relations and Politics at the University of York and as part of her appointments, she held teaching, supervision and research positions at the University of Cambridge, SOAS, the University of Exeter and The Queen Mary.
She was a Global Expert on Egypt and Tunisia in the ERC co-funded V-Dem project based at the University of Gothenburg and was a Global Expert on Egypt and Tunisia for the ERC-funded DEMED Project led by the University of Glasgow, and a Middle East and North Africa country expert in the British Academy CITMODES-funded GLOBALCIT programme based at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
In 2025 she was selected as a member of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Peer Review College.
Her book Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: Political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy was published by Manchester University Press in December 2024.
In May 2024, Maria Gloria signed a new book contract as editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Environment and Middle Eastern Politics.
Dr Maria Gloria Polimeno's next research project deals with the governance of the environment, focusing on the survival of elites and the dynamics of structural resistance through nature. The project sits at the intersection of international political economy, environmental politics and the governance of authoritarianism.
Another research project she is working on is ecocides in the Middle East. This is a larger and pioneering comparative project that is additionally based on collaborations outside the academic world, and which envisions digital and VR outputs.
She holds a PhD from the University of Exeter.
Research Cluster affliation
International Political Economy Research Cluster