The IWM is pleased to announce that the Albanian-British political scientist and philosopher Lea Ypi will deliver this year's Speech to Europe. The event, which sees its fourth edition this year, will take place on the evening of 15 May on Vienna's Judenplatz.
Lea Ypi is a professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her areas of expertise include contemporary political theory, German idealism (including Kant and Marx), and the intellectual history of the Balkans. She has received several awards for her academic work, including a British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science. In 2022, she was named one of the world’s Top 10 Thinkers by Prospect Magazine. Her philosophical memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin, 2021), which explores her childhood in Albania during the final stages of communism, has been translated in more than thirty-five languages and won several awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize.
As part of the IWM's Vienna Humanities Festival 2022, Ypi talked about her award-winning book and how she herself was shaped by the idea of freedom:
She was also a visiting fellow at the IWM in 2024, where she gave a lecture entitled "Can Beauty Save the World? On Historical Injustice, Reconciliation and the Role of Aesthetic Education":
About the event
The Speech to Europe allows public intellectuals to provide food for thought about the future of the European Project. Yale historian and IWM Permanent Fellow Timothy Snyder delivered the first Speech to Europe in 2019, in which he argued that Europe must face its history and shed the oft-repeated myth of innocent nation-states banding together in unity. After a three-year hiatus, the Ukrainian lawyer and human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk delivered the second Speech to Europe in 2023 under the banner “No Peace without Freedom, no Justice without Law.“ In 2024, philosopher Omri Boehm analyzed the importance of the crimes of colonialism and the Holocaust for Europe’s political self-conception:
A joint event by Wiener Festwochen, ERSTE Foundation and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). In Cooperation with the Jewish Museum Vienna.
Photo Credit: James Robins
