Seyla Benhabib

Benhabib has received numerous honors and awards for her work. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. She held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2000 and was a Tanner Lecturer at UC, Berkeley in 2004. In the 2008–2009 academic year, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). In 2012 she was awarded the Dr. Leopold-Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen in recognition of outstanding achievement in the field of theology, intellectual history, historical research and philosophy, as well as the commitment to international understanding and tolerance. In 2014, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Georgetown University and the Meister Eckhart Prize for her work on the subject of identity.

Benhabib taught in the departments of philosophy at Boston University, SUNY Stony Brook, the New School for Social Research, and the Department of Government at Harvard University, before taking her current position at Yale. She has also served on editorial advisory boards for a number of journals, including Political Theory, Human Rights Review, Journal of International Political Theory, and Ethics & International Affairs. In 1992, she co-founded with Andrew Arato the journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory and served as its co-editor-in-chief until 1997. She served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006–2007.

Born in Istanbul, Benhabib was educated at English-language schools in that city. She received her high school diploma in 1970 from Robert College, then called the American College for Girls in Istanbul, before leaving for the United States. She received a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1972 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1977. She traces her family history back to the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain on the "second reconquista."

Seyla Benhabib (/ˈ s eɪ l ə ˌ b ɛ n h ə ˈ b iː b / born September 9, 1950) is a Turkish-born American philosopher of Sephardic ancestry. She is Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002–2008. Benhabib is well known for her work in political philosophy, which draws on critical theory and feminist political theory. She has written extensively on the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, as well as on the topic of human migration. She is the author of numerous books, and she has received several prestigious awards and lectureships in recognition of her work.