Simona Forti is an Italian philosopher and academic, whose main interests are in political philosophy
and contemporary ethics. She is Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont and one of the founding members of FINO, a PhD Program in Philosophy coordinated by the Northwestern Italian University Consortium, as well as the standing president of Bios, an international and interdisciplinary research center on biopolitics and bioethics based at the University of Piemonte Orientale.
Simona Forti is widely recognized in Italy and aboard for her far-reaching studies on Hannah Arendt’s thought and the philosophical idea of totalitarianism. In recent years she has given important contributions to the debate on biopolitics launched by Michel Foucault, focusing on Nazi biopolitics of the souls and democratic biopolitics of the bodies. In her last volume, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, translated into English and published by Stanford University Press in 2015, she addresses the contemporary reshaping of the notion of evil.
She has held visiting appointments at many European and American universities. She is teaching in the Fall at The New School for Social Research in New York. Moreover, during the spring semester 2013–14 she has been awarded a “Fulbright Distinguished Chair” at Northwestern University.