Seyla Benhabib Bio

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Benhabib, Seyla (b. 1950), Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale

• received her first BA in Istanbul, then a BA in philosophy from Brandeis in the 1970s, and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1977. She taught the New School for Social Research 1991-93, Harvard 1993-2000, and since 2000 at Yale.
• Current research on multiculturalism in liberal democracies and transformations of citizenship
• Selected publications (more detailed list and biography):
  • Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 455 pages, UCSB: B809.3 .B46 1986.
  • translator: Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. Trans. Seyla Benhabib (MIT Press, 1987)
  • co-editor: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. (co-edited with Wolfgang Bonss and John McCole) (MIT Press, 1993).
  • co-editor: Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, edited by Maurizio P. D'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (MIT, 1996)
  • The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Sage Pub., 1996)
  • Transformation of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation-State in the Era of Globalization (Van Gorcum: Amsterdam, 2000)
  • The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton , 2002)
• In an April 2013 panel discussion at Clark University, Benhabib spoke of her heritage (from the 2012-13 Annual Report of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, p. 14):
  "A Sephardi Jew from “multicultural” Istanbul, whose family history in Ottoman lands goes back to 1492, she had been unfamiliar with the facts concerning Turkey’s anti-Jewish war-time policies. Growing up amid the secular ideals of Kemalism in the late 1950s and 1960s, she embraced her dual Turkish-Jewish identity. Yet, in retrospect, she expressed sadness over the opportunism behind the once strong Turkish-Israeli alliance which sacrificed recognition of the Armenian Genocide for geo-political and economic benefits."