Nadia Urbinati (Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence, 1989) is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, Department of Political Science. She is permanent visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna of Pisa and teaches courses at the Bocconi University of Milan. She has taught at the University of San Paolo and Unicamp, Brazil, and was an Alliance Visiting Professor at Sciences Po, France. She co-chairs the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and has been a co-editor of Constellations.
She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Rockefeller Fellow of the University Center for Human Values, Princeton. She chairs the Annual Gramsci Lecture at the Gramsci Institute of Bologna and the research project on political innovation at the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan. She is contributing in a global research on the “perspectives of democracy and equality” promoted by The International Panel on Social Progress chaired by Amartya Sen. She was a member of the Committee of Experts on the Reform of the Constitution nominated by the Italian Government. In 2008, the President of the Italian Republic awarded her of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for “her contribution to the study of democracy and the diffusion of Italian thought abroad”.
Her field of research and interests is related to the study of democracy, its procedures and institutions and its historical transformations. She is presently working on representation and partisanship. She is the author of numerous book chapters, articles and books in English and Italian, and among other, The Tyranny of the Moderns (Yale 2015); Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth and the People (Harvard 2014); Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006, rep. 2008); Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002, which received the Spitz award). She edited and co-edited several books and more recently with Stefano Recchia, Giuseppe Mazzini’s Cosmopolitanism of Nations (Princeton 2012) Steven Lukes, Condorcet’s Political Writings (Cambridge University Press 2012). She is co-editing a collection of essay on Machiavelli for The University of Chicago Press.
She is a regular contributor on political issues of the Italian newspapers La Repubblica.