Seyla Benhabib is a Member of International Advisory Council at Istanbul Policy Center and the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She was Director of the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (2002-2008).
She is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize in 2009. 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 received an honorary degree from the Humanistic University in Utrecht in 2004. 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 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 Ere (2002), and The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004). Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, based on 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.
Benhabib received her PhD and M.A. in Philosophy from Yale University and her B.A. from Brandeis University.