With Speaker Lea Ypi (Professor in Politics and Philosophy at LSE)

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Indignity: A Life Reimagined is Lea Ypi's most recent venture into philosophical literature. Her first book Free, was a memoir detailing her upbringing in Albania before and after the fall of communism, and an exploration of the varying conceptions of freedom attendant to her personal and historical setting. Her most recent book is a biographical reimagination of the mysterious life of her grandmother. Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941, and she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged. What follows is a reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. The recent book centers conceptions of dignity and indignity, and raises a number of philosophically interesting questions about our relation to the past.

In her talk, Ypi will share some passages of Indignity, and discuss the method of the book, her turn to philosophical literature, and the relation between philosophy, history, and literature. 

Lea Ypi is Professor in Politics and Philosophy at LSE. She 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 Indignity: A Life Reimagined and Free: Coming of Age at the end of History, as well as Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and won numerous prizes.

Sponsor: DLCL, Philosophy Department, The Research Workshop in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts