Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib (born September 9, 1950) is a Turkish-Sephardic-American philosopher. She is Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, and a well-known contemporary philosopher. She is the author of several books, most notably about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Benhabib is well known for combining critical theory with feminist theory.

Born in Istanbul, Benhabib was educated at English language schools in that city. She received a B.A. in 1970 from Robert College, called the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She traces her family history back to the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain on the "second reconquista." She has cited Istanbul as reminiscent of "big cosmopolitan centers of, in a way, the old Europe." She left for the United States in 1970. She received a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1972 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1977.

Prior to arriving at Yale, 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. She also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2000. She is married to well-known author and journalist Jim Sleeper, who is currently also a political-science lecturer at Yale. She also serves on the editorial advisory board for the Ethics & International Affairs. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. In the 2008-2009 academic year, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

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