Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi (born in Tirana in 1979) is an Albanian political philosopher and writer, professor of politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her work lies in normative political theory, Enlightenment thought and the intellectual history of the Balkans, and she has become widely known through her memoirs and her writing on the recent history of her country.

She was the eldest child of two ordinary citizens under communist rule who, in Ypi's late childhood, became involved in Albanian democratic politics. She grew up across communist and post-communist Albania, an experience at the centre of her book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (2021). Her family, traditionally Muslim, was forced to be atheist; Ypi now describes herself as agnostic. Among her relatives were a great-grandfather who briefly served as prime minister in the 1920s and a grandfather imprisoned for fifteen years by the communist state.

She studied philosophy and literature at Sapienza University of Rome and later completed her doctorate at the European University Institute in 2008. She has held posts at Oxford, Sciences Po and other institutions. Her research covers democracy, justice, migration and territorial rights, as well as Kant and Marxism.

Her influence reaches well beyond academia. Free was widely read and prized, and Indignity: A Life Reimagined (2025), another family history, traces the idea of dignity through her grandmother's life, from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the arrival of communism in the Balkans.