Alexander Lee is a specialist in the cultural and political history of the Renaissance in Italy. After completing his first two degrees at Trinity College, University of Cambridge – where he was a senior scholar and winner of the Earl of Derby Prize for Outstanding Performance in the Tripos Examinations, the James Webb Prize for the History of Ideas, and the Bowen Prize for History – he undertook his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh. He has previously held posts at the University of Oxford, the Université du Luxembourg, and the Università degli studi di Bergamo, and has also taught at the universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Lyon 2. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

He is the author of Machiavelli: His Life and TimesLink opens in a new window (London: Picador, 2020) - which chosen as a "Book of the Year 2020" by both the New Statesman and the Financial Times -, Humanism and Empire: the Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), The Ugly Renaissance (London: Hutchinson, 2013) – a Times Literary Supplement "Book of the Year 2013" – and Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2012). He has also edited The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy, c.1494-c.1559 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity, c.1300-c.1550 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) and Libertés et citoyenneté urbaines du moyen âge à nos jours (Trier and Luxembourg: CLUDEM, 2015), and is the co-author of The End of Politics: Triangulation, Realignment and the Battle for the Centre Ground (London: Politico’s, 2006). He is currently working on a new history of the Venetian ghettoLink opens in a new window, which will be published by Picador and a volume entitled Why Machiavelli Matters (with Stephen Bowd) for Bloomsbury.

He writes a regular column for History Today ('Missing Pieces', ‘Portrait of the Author as a Historian', 'The Music of Time', 'The Historian's Cookbook', and 'Natural Histories'), and has contributed pieces on a wide range of historical and cultural subjects to the Sunday Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the Catholic Herald, and Dissent.

He is represented by Georgina Capel Associates.