Professor of Political Philosophy at Piemonte Orientale University, Italy. She is a coordinating member of “FINO”, PhD International Program in Philosophy of the Northwestern Italian Universities Consortium. Currently she is Visiting Professor at The News School for Social Research, Philosophy Department. Simona Forti is Principal Investigator in the Grant Awarded Project, by HERA JRP “Uses of the Past”, “The Debt: Historicizing Europe’s relations with the South”, together with P. Wagner (Barcelon), A. Honneth, (Frankfurt), B. Strath (Helsinki).
From 2003 to 2011 Simona Forti was elected as member of the jury for “Der Hannah-Arendt Preis für politischen Denken” at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen and Berlin. From 2004 to 2007 she served as the Italian member of the Coordinating “International Committee of the European Science Foundation Network Activity on “The Politics and History of European Democratization” (PHED) for the European Science Foundation. She has held visiting appointments at many European and American Universities. During the spring semester 2013–14 she has been awarded a “Fulbright Distinguished Chair” at Northwestern University, (Evanston, Il).
Her main interests are in political philosophy and contemporary ethics.
She is widely recognized for her far-reaching studies on Hannah Arendt’s thought and the philosophical idea of Totalitarianism. In recent years she has given important contributions to the debate on biopolitics launched by Michel Foucault, by focusing on Nazi biopolitics and democratic biopolitics of the bodies. In her last volume, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, translated into English and published by Stanford University Press in 2015, she deals with the contemporary reshaping of the notion of Evil, offering a new inspiring genealogy of the relationship between evil and power.
Her essays have been translated in many European languages. Among her recent works in English, see:
- The New Demons. Rethinking evil and power today, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2015;
- The Soul as Site of Dissidence”, in Thinking After Europe. Jan Patocka and Politics, ed. by F. Tavaand D. Meachan, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015
- Democratic bodies, biopolitically correct, “Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal”, XXXVI, n. 1 (2015)
- Parrhesia between East and West: Foucault and Dissidence, in V. Lemm, M. Vatter (ed.), The Government of Life. Foucault, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism, Fordham University Press, New York 2014;
- Spectres of Totality, in K. Palonen, T. Pulkkinen, J.M. Rosales (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe, Ashgate Publishing Company, Farnham 2008;
- The Biopolitics of Souls. Racism, Nazism and Plato, Political Theory, XXXIV, n.1, 2006;
- Hegel, Marx and Arendt, in Hannah Arendt: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, ed. by G. Williams, Routledge, London 2006;
- Hannah Arendt’s Legacy at 100 Years of Her Birth, Revista de Ciencia Politica, XXVI, n. 2, 2006;