Professor Albena Azmanova (City St George’s University of London) will deliver the lecture on “Populism and the crisis of democracies” on Saturday February 14th, 2026 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Albena Azmanova is a professor of political science at City St George’s University of London with specialisation in critical social theory and political economy. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and critiques of contemporary capitalism. Her most recent research on the political economy and social psychology of the rise of populism in current-day democracies has received numerous awards. Professor Azmanova is a member of the expert group to the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality of the European Parliament and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick. As a Senior Fellow at Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, led by Bard College, she is curating, with Pavlina Tcherneva, the symposium “Post-Neoliberalism: Pathways for Transformative Economics and Politics”. Professor Azmanova is founder and editor-in-chief (with James Chamberlain) of Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis and co-director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle. She also serves on the European Civic Academy’s Task Force to the European Civic Forum, among other advisory positions in international political institutions.