Lea Ypi (FBA, FAE, FAA) is the Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, Academia Europea and the Albanian Academy of Science. She recently held the Annual Chair on the Invention of Europe through Languages and Cultures at the Collège de France and was the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Born and raised in Albania, Lea has degrees in Philosophy and in Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a PhD from the European University Institute and was a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press.

Lea’s latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, published by Penguin Press in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in North America, was a book of the year for the Sunday Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Prospect, TLS, NPR, and shortlisted for numerous prizes.

Her 2021 philosophical memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, published by Penguin Press in the UK and W.W. Norton & Company in North America, won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize and has been translated in more than thirty-five languages.

Lea’s academic work has been recognised with the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and the Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement. She coedits the journal Political Philosophy and occasionally writes for The Guardian and Financial Times.

Read more about Free here. A profile written by Han Zhang for The New Yorker is here. Another profile by Caterina Lobenstein for Die Zeit (in German) is here.

Photograph: The New Institute (Hamburg)