Noga Arikha
Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. Her first book, Passions and Tempers (Ecco / HarperCollins, 2007; Bompiani, 2009) was a New York Times Review Editor’s Choice and one of the Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books for 2007. She wrote with Marcello Simonetta a biography of Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon and the Rebel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Bompiani, 2011). The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, an exploration of brain, self, dementia and medicine based on the stories of neuropsychiatric patients, was published in 2022 by Basic Books (UK and US). Franz Boas: In Praise of Open Minds, part of the ‘Jewish Lives’ series of Yale University Press, is published in 2025.
She was born and raised in Paris, then lived and studied in London. She took a Ph.D. from the Warburg Institute before moving to New York in 2002, where she was a Fellow at Columbia University and Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College. In 2011, she returned to Paris with her family. She has been living since 2021 in Florence, where she is a Research Associate at the European University Institute for a project on democratic innovation.
