Lea Ypi

Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Lea Ypi is a specialist in critical theory and Marxism whose research is in the areas of global justice, migration, and democratic theory. Having grown up in the communist Albania of Enver Hoxha, a regime that collapsed during her adolescence to make way for the market economy and political pluralism, she writes about this experience in her book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (in Spanish, Libre. El desafío de crecer en el fin de la historia, Anagrama, 2023), an original memoir with a marked philosophical and political background which, translated into more than twenty languages, was awarded the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also the author of numerous academic articles and essays like The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford University Press, 2021) in which she offers a fresh interpretation of the work of Immanuel Kant, and Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford University Press, 2012) which, co-edited with Sarah Fine, explores contemporary debates on migration and the acquisition of citizenship. Throughout her academic career, Ypi has made research visits to such prestigious international centres as Nuffield College, Oxford, and Sciences Po in Paris, and has received several awards for her work, including the British Academy Prize Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science. In addition to her other writing, she occasionally publishes opinion pieces in The Guardian.