Role
Professor of Political Theory at Syracuse University in Florence and Associate Professor at the School of Liberal Studies – New York University, Florence, where he teaches Social Foundations.
Bio
Debora Spini graduated in Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, and in 1995 she obtained a specialization in History of Political Thought at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa.
Since 1998, she has taught at New York University in Florence and Political Theory at Syracuse University in Florence; for many years, she was a professor of Social Philosophy and Philosophies of the Public Sphere at the University of Florence. She has taught at NYU Shanghai. She is a member of the Italian Society of Critical Theory and the Italian Society of Political Philosophy, and is president of the Pietro Martire Vermigli Protestant Cultural Center in Florence.
Her research has spanned Protestant theology and early modern contractualist thought, focusing on the transformations of the public sphere in the era of globalization. Her current research focuses on the relationship between religious groups and the public sphere, secularization and post-secularization, and the rise of populism and neo-authoritarianism in general, with a focus on gender issues and the instrumentalization of religious identities. She has written several essays on the relationship between gender identity, feminist practices, and religious belonging, and on the intersection of the post-secular paradigm and the post- and decolonial paradigm. She is also interested in Indian political theory, particularly the thought of B.R. Ambedkar and the debate on Indian secularism, a topic on which she is a frequent guest speaker at academic institutions in India.
She is the author of essays and volumes including La società civile post nazionale (Meltemi, 2006), Civil society and international governance ( Routledge , 2010) and La coscienza protestante (Claudiana, 2016).