Lea is a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. A native of Albania, she has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza, a PhD from the European University Institute and was a Post-Doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press. Her latest book, Free, published by Penguin Press and translated into more than thirty languages, has won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Award and was shortlisted, among others, for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Prize. Her academic work has been recognised with the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement.