Nadia Urbinati

Nadia Urbinati (born 26 January 1955) is an Italian political theorist. She is the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University.

Personal life
In 1989, she received her Ph.D. at European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is also a naturalized US citizen.

Academic work
Urbinati specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She teaches at Columbia University where she co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought. She is one of the longest-serving scholars of populism in modern academia.

With Andrew Arato, she was the co-editor of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization.

Prior to Columbia, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and was a 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 di Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant'Anna and has taught at Bocconi University in Milan, SciencesPo in Paris, and the University of Campinas in Brazil.

Awards
In 2008, Italian president Giorgio Napolitano made Urbanati 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 is the winner of the 2008-9 Lenfest/Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award and she received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and democratic theory for Mill on Democracy.