The Measure of Dignity

What do we owe the past—and to those who lived through its lies?

Please join renowned philosopher and award-winning author Lea Ypi at Clio's to discuss her latest book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined. Simultaneously a work of history, memory, and moral imagination, it is centered on Ypi’s grandmother Leman, whose life traces the fault lines of the twentieth century: the fall of empire, the rise of fascism, and the long shadows of communism in the Balkans. Through Leman's story, Ypi explores how dignity endures and sometimes fractures when truth is manipulated and justice deferred.

Lea Ypi will be in conversation with Anna Stilz, political theorist and professor at UC Berkeley, whose work probes the ethics of freedom, loyalty, and belonging. Together they will explore how philosophy can live in the intimate spaces of family and conscience and what remains when political ideals collapse.

This event is co-sponsored by Boston Review, whose new issue, The Real Border Crisis, features an essay by Ypi on the deeper injustices driving the war on immigrants—a reminder that the struggles of the past continue to shape the moral landscape of our present.

Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A native of Albania and a prizewinning academic, she was named one of the most important thinkers in the world in 2022 by Prospect magazine. Her book Free: Coming of Age at the End of History was an international bestseller and won several prestigious prizes. She contributes regularly to The Guardian, New Statesman, and Financial Times.

Anna Stilz is Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2024, she taught for fifteen years in the Politics Department and Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Stilz is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton 2009), and Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford 2019). Stilz is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs, and a Section Editor for Social and Political Philosophy at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.