Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and Director of the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Professor Benhabib is an influential scholar of feminist theory and 19th– and 20th–century European social and political thought, particularly that of Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Arendt. Her current research focuses on multiculturalism and citizenship in liberal democracies. She gave the University of Amsterdam’s 2000 Spinoza lectures, which are published as Transformations of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation–State in the Era of Globalization, and Cambridge University's 2002 Seeley lectures.

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Professor Benhabib earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1977. She has previously taught at Harvard University (1993–2000) and the New School for Social Research (1991–93).

Professor Benhabib is the author of Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), Situating the Self (1992), and The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt and the co–author of Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (1994). She is also the editor of Democracy and Difference (1996) and co–editor of Feminism as Critique (1987), The Communicative Ethics Controversy (1990), and On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (1993). Her new book Democratic Equality and Cultural Diversity: Political Identities in the Global Era will appear from Princeton University Press in 2002. She was a co–founder of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory and served as its editor–in–chief from 1994 to 1997.