Alexander is an Associate Professor (habilitated as Full Professor) of the Anthropology of Globalization at the University of Perugia and a Visiting Researcher at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute (EUI), Italy. 

Between 2013 and 2018, at Queen’s University Belfast, he contributed as a Research Fellow to the establishment of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, and also collaborated on international projects with the Institute for Global Food Security and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

After receiving his PhD from University of Siena (2009), he held postdoctoral positions at University of Münster, Germany (2009) and at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel (2009-2011).

RESEARCH 

How can we live together in a world that is both deeply divided and undeniably shared? This is the question that lies at the heart of Alexander’s research. His work focuses on Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Jewish relations and rural change in the Southern Mediterranean.

Over the course of the past two decades, Alexander has worked in southern Israel and its border regions with Bedouin and Jewish citizens, and coexistence & social justice activists. Since 2016, he has also worked with food sovereignty movements in Italy.

His publications—in English, Italian, German, and French—include six books and over 40 book chapters and articles, including in leading journals such as American Anthropologist, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. His forthcoming book, Voices of Reason. Solidarity Activism and the Separatist Imagination in Israel, will be published by SUNY Press.

Alexander is a co-founder of the network "Anthropology and Social Movements" of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) and of the Political Imagination Laboratories (PIL), an international experimental venue for visual anthropology. He has presented his research at universities in Berlin, Bucharest, Chicago, Innsbruck, Lisbon, Lubljana, San Diego, and many others.

Alexander has made his home in the Israeli Bedouin town of Rahat, a desert kibbutz, a Mizrahi neighborhood in Be'er Sheva, a coffee shop in Sinai, at Ben Gurion University's desert studies campus in Sede Boqer, the student town of Münster, and in the divided yet shared city of Belfast. 

He now lives in Perugia, where he is also a bee-keeper in his spare time.