Thematically, his academic interests mostly center on the emergence of the Islamic movement and faith tradition in the historical context of the late antique Middle East. His recent research explores the questions of ideology, imperialism and propaganda in Byzantine, Sasanian, and early Islamic societies.
In 2013, he was awarded a Mellon doctoral fellowship to join the research project The Qurʾan Seminar, directed by Gabriel Said Reynolds at Notre Dame University.
Tesei has a Ph.D. jointly from the Department of Oriental Studies, University of Rome (La Sapienza), and the Department of Arabic Studies, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris. In 2018 and 2019, he was the Patricia Crone member at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, and previously spent five years as a Polonsky research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Jerusalem.