Seyla Benhabib


Seyla Benhabib is  the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University  and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (2002-2008).   Professor Benhabib was the President of the  Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07 and  Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin  in 2009.  She is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize in 2009.

She is the author of Critique,  Norm and Utopia. A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory  (1986); Situating the Self. Gender,  Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992; winner of the  National Educational Association’s best book of the year award) ; together with  Drucilla Cornell, Feminism as Critique (1986);  then with, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical  Exchange (1994); The Reluctant  Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002); The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global  Era, (2002) and The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which  won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2205)  and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004).  Another  Cosmopolitanism. Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, based  on  Professor Benhabib’s 2004 Tanner  Lectures delivered at Berkeley,  with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka has appeared  from Oxford University Press in 2006.

She has also edited 8 volumes, ranging from discussions of  communicative ethics, to democracy and difference, to identities, allegiances  and affinities, and gender, citizenship and immigration. The latest is a volume  coedited with Judith Resnik of the Yale   Law School  and called, Mobility and Immobility.  Gender, Borders and Citizenship (2009).

Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French,  Italian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Japanese  and Chinese. 

She has been a member of the American Academy  of Arts and Science since 1995 and has  held the Gauss Lectures (Princeton, 1998); the Spinoza Chair for distinguished  visitors (Amsterdam, 2001); the John Seeley  Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, 2002), the Tanner  Lectures (Berkeley, 2004) and was the Catedra Ferrater  Mora Distinguished Professor in Girona,   Spain (Summer  2005). She received an Honorary degree from the Humanistic  University in Utrecht in 2004.

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