Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi is the author of the international bestseller Free. Coming of Age at the End of History (2021), in which she compellingly describes her experiences growing up within a communist regime that after the fall of the Berlin Wall suddenly came to collapse. She is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and teaches Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences in Canberra, Australia. After graduating in Philosophy and in Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, Ypi obtained her PhD at the European University Institute in 2008. She then worked as a research fellow at Oxford, at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. In addition, she has held visiting positions at Stanford, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Brazil among other universities. Ypi has written several books in the field of political theory, on democracy, justice, migration, Marxism, critical theory and on the intellectual history of Southeastern Europe — especially of her home country Albania. She considers herself a democratic socialist, more specifically a Marxist.