Join us for this talk with Lea Ypi, who will be speaking about her latest book, Free: Coming of Age at the end of History.

Lea Ypi joins Abby Innes to discuss her memoir and her experiences growing up in Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe during the fall of communism in 1990. They will be exploring how lived experiences in the transition from state socialism to liberalism can shape our understanding of freedom and related critiques of society.

Meet our speakers and chair.

Lea Ypi (@lea_ypi) is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD. She is the author of Free: Coming of Age at the end of History.

Abby Innes (@innes_abby) is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE. She is the author of Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (Yale University Press, 2001) and her current manuscript, Late Soviet Britain: The Political Economy of State Failure in the Materialist Utopias is currently under review with Cambridge University Press. She has published widely on issues of party-state development and state capture in Central Europe, and, more recently, on the political economy of the neoliberal state in the UK. 

The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector.

This year the LSE European Institute is celebrating its 30th Anniversary. The European Institute has been at the forefront of study and research on Europe for three decades and will be running a series of special events to mark the occasion.

Twitter hashtag for this event: #LSETransition