About

Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. She works as a science humanist, fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists and artists in order to bring to a general audience accessible accounts that analyse the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied, feeling and thinking selves. Always concerned with the relation between mind and body, she initially focused for her PhD on life sciences in early modern Europe, but her interests and writings encompass a broad range of periods, cultures and disciplines.

Her latest book, The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, is an exploration of brain, self, dementia and medicine based on the stories of neuropsychiatric patients, published by Basic Books (UK and US) in Spring 2022.

She has just completed a biography of anthropologist Franz Boas for the “Jewish Lives” series of Yale University Press, due out in 2025.

Her critically acclaimed first book, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, published in the US by Ecco (HarperCollins) and in Italy by Bompiani, was a New York Times Review Editor’s Choice for July 2007 and one of the Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books for 2007. (The book website is here.) Her second book, a biography of Lucien Bonaparte co-authored with Marcello Simonetta, was Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power, published in the US/UK by Palgrave Macmillan and in Italy by Bompiani.

She is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), an Honorary Fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings, and a Research Associate at the Institut Jean Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris).

Click here to download Noga’s CV.

Noga is represented by Andrew Gordon at David Higham Agency, London.

Noga Arikha was born and raised in Paris, one of two daughters of painter Avigdor Arikha and poet Anne Atik. She left for London for her studies, taking a BA in German and Philosophy at King’s College, London. After a spell working in New York as editorial assistant to Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, she joined the Warburg Institute in London, earning an MA in the early modern history of ideas and then a PhD in History, with a thesis on the mind-body relation in the late 17th century (the full text is here). From 2002 to 2011, she lived in New York. She was an "Arts and Neuroscience" postdoctoral Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Bard College and at the Bard Graduate Center, NYC. In 2011, she and her family moved to Paris. She taught and was Chair of Liberal Studies at Paris College of Art from 2012 to 2015. Since spring 2021, she has been based in Florence.