Nikolas Kompridis is the Director of the Institute for Social Justice in Australian Catholic University and Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought. Inspired by the Critical Theory Tradition, he was drawn into an academic career, which took him to Frankfurt where he worked with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas as a postdoctoral fellow at the J.W. Goethe University.

In 2006 he published “Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future” a book that, while drawing on many of his insights, is intensely critical of Habermas. The Professor is also the author of “Philosophical Romanticism” which was published the same year (2006) and of the “The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought” which was published in 2014.

He has also published a number of essays arguing for his own conceptions of cultural change and currently completing two new books, the one concerns the critical theory of receptivity, and the other reanimating romanticism.

Kompridis before being a professor in Philosophy, he started as a musician in the University of Toronto and Yale University in Connecticut. He founded and directed a new Canadian music ensemble, Sound Pressure. During that time he worked with some of the world’s leading composers such as Frederic Rzewski, Martin Bresnick, Louis Andriessen, and David Lang.