Nadia Urbinati

Nadia Urbinati is a political scientist and the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. Her work focuses on modern political thought and the democratic (and anti-democratic) traditions. Urbinati is especially known for her long-term research on populism, most recently published by Harvard University Press in Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. She was a member of the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. In Italy, Urbinati is permanent visiting professor at Pisa’s Scuola Superiore de Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant’Ana. She has also taught at Bocconi University Milan, Sciences Po in Paris, and the University of Campinas in Brazil. In 2008, Urbinati was made a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic “for her contribution to the study of democracy and the diffusion of Italian liberal and democratic thought abroad.” She also received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and democratic theory for Mill on Democracy.