Seyla Benhabib, born in Istanbul, Turkey, is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics from 2002 to 2008. She was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000.
Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009; the Leopold Lucas Prize from the Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen (2012); and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014, one of Germany’s most prestigious philosophical prizes). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (2011-12), she has been a research affiliate and senior scholar in many institutions in the US and in Europe such as Berlin’s Wissenschaftkolleg (2009), NYU’s Strauss Center for Advanced Studies in Law and Justice (2012), and the European University Institute in Florence (Summer 2015).
She is the author of over a dozen works which have been translated into thirteen langauges. Benhabib has also edited and coedited 10 volumes on topics ranging from democracy and difference, to the rights of migrant women and children, to the communicative ethics controversy, and on Hannah Arendt. Her volume, Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2009), edited with Judith Resnik from the Yale Law School, has been named by Choice one of the outstanding academic books of the year. Benhabib is the author of The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Sage Publications, California, May 1996, reprinted with a new Introduction and Afterword by Rowman and Littlefield, New Jersey, 2003, and the Editor of Politics in Dark Times. Encounters with Hannah Arendt. Cambridge University Press 2010.