Santiago Zabala is an EU citizen born in 1975. He was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva. He first studied philosophy at the University of Turin where in 2002 he obtained his M.A. (with a thesis under the supervision of Gianni Vattimo) and in 2006 his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome.In November 2007 he was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship by Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the years 2008/2009 at the University of Potsdam. After spending the Spring semester of 2010 as a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University Zabala has been appointed ICREA Research Professor (with tenure) in the Department of History of Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Philosophy at the University of Barcelona where he currently teaches a course on Contemporary Philosophy and and is a member of the Research Group: "The Horizon of the Common".

He is the author of The Remains of Being (2009), The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), and co-author with G. Vattimo of Hermeneutic Communism (2011). He edited G. Vattimo’s Art’s Claim to Truth (2008) and Nihilism and Emancipation (2004), Richard Rorty and G. Vattimo's The Future of Religion (2005), and Weakening Philosophy (2007) with contributions from Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Nancy, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, Jack Miles, Fernando Savater, Nancy Frankenberry, Rüdiger Bubner, James Risser, Manfred Frank, G. Vattimo and others. With Jeff Malpas he has co-edited Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years after Truth and Method (2010) with contributions from B. Babich, G. Warnke, G. Vattimo, H.-H. Köegler, R. Valgenti, C. Jamme, W. McNeill, J. Grondin, R. Dostal, C. Prado, L. K. Schmidt, N. Davey, P. Vandevelde, M. Marder, R. Palmer, and others. His forthcoming books are Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event, co-edited with Michael Marder (2012) and Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics also co-edited with Michael Marder (Continuum 2013).

Zabala writes op-eds and reviews for "Al Jazeera", "El Pais" and many philosophical Journals, including the "International Journal of Philosophical Studies", "Journal of the History of Philosophy", "Common Knowledge", "Telos", "Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy", "Aquinas", "Books in Canada", "Iride", "Claves de Razón Práctica", "Iris. European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate", "The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory" and "Purlieu". Zabala is also the editor of the Bellaterra Publishers Series on "Political Philosophy" and co-editor (with G. Vattimo) of the Davies Group Publisher Series on "Contemporary European Cultural Studies".