James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics – Dignity and Historical Injustice: An Albanian Family’s History

ABSTRACT: Professor Lea Ypi reads and discusses a chapter from her new book project which follows the journey of a woman from Ottoman Salonica to a life under surveillance in post-war Communist Albania. The book explores the moral and political meanings of dignity, individual and collective, in connection to questions of truth and reconciliation, historical injustice and the relationship between fact and fiction.

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Lea Ypi: Lea Ypi is professor in political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an honorary professor in philosophy at the Australian National University. A native of Albania, she has degrees in philosophy and in literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a Ph.D. from the European University Institute and was a post-doctoral prize research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. 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. Her latest book, a philosophical memoir entitled “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 is being translated into more than twenty languages. Her academic work has been recognized with the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and the Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement. She coedits The Journal of Political Philosophy and occasionally writes for The Guardian.