Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University and Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School and Professor Adjunct of Law. She also holds appointments in Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, she received her BA in 1972 from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in 1977 from Yale University. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany from 1979 to 1981, when she studied with Jürgen Habermas at the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg.

Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize (2009), the Leopold Lucas Prize (2012), and the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-12) and was Fellow at the WissenschaftsKolleg in Berlin in 2009, and has been a Visiting Professor in numerous institutions in Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, Israel, Turkey, and Brazil.

She has written and co-edited over 15 award-winning books on critical theory from Hegel to Habermas; Hannah Arendt; discourse ethics, feminist theory and human rights and her work has been translated into 12 languages. She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia. A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996); The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global World (2003); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism. Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations (2006); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (2011); Equality and Difference. Human Dignity and Popular Sovereignty based on her Leopold Lucas lectures (2013); Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (2018) and edited together with Volker Kaul, Toward New Democratic Imaginaries. Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture, and Politics (Springer 2016).