Dr Giulia Sciorati is Lecturer in Contemporary Asian Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Prior to joining King’s, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2023-2026) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of International Studies at the University of Trento (2021-2023), where she also obtained her PhD.

Giulia is the recipient of a UKRI-ESRC Shifting Global Polarities grant supporting her research on China and the world heritage regime. She is also a member of the Mapping Global China Soft Power Working Group at the University of Oxford.

Research Interests

• International Relations Theory
• Narrative Studies
• Political Communication
• Visual Politics and Visual Methods
• Global China

Giulia’s research examines how political meanings are constituted, circulated, and contested in international politics. She is particularly interested in performativity, and in how intersubjective understandings of political reality take shape through political practice.

Empirically, Giulia uses Global China as a site of theorisation, with particular attention to narratives, visualities, and the political uses of art and culture.

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1311-8326

Publications

• Sciorati, G. (2026). The self-categorisation recursive loop: explaining the persistence of dichotomies in international relations through China’s rise. International Politics, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-026-00781-6

• Sciorati, G. (2026). Conceptualising autocracy promotion as commercialisation: marketising narratives and Chinese responses to central Asian protests. European Journal of International Relations, 32(2), 586-610. https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661251371499

• Sciorati, G. (2023). ‘Constructing’ heritage diplomacy in Central Asia: China’s Sinocentric historicisation of transnational World Heritage Sites. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 29(1), 94-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2022.2141718

Teaching

• 6SSW3005 Contemporary Strategy in East Asia (BA3)

• 7SSWN110 East Asian Security (co-convenor) (PGT)

• 6SSW3047 / 7SSWN204 The United States and China (co-convenor) (BA3 / PGT)

PhD Supervision 

Giulia is open to supervise PhD students with projects related to her research interests.