Bonnie Honig
Department of Political Science

Bonnie Honig, also a half-time senior research fellow for the American Bar Foundation, specializes in the areas of contemporary political, democratic and feminist theory. She has written on the hidden costs of legitimation in political theory and practice, the cultural politics of immigration, conceptions of time and progress in political and legal thinking, discretion and emergency power, popular constitutionalism, and, most recently, on the conflict between justice and mourning in Sophocles’ Antigone. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Strategies, Social Text, and elsewhere and has been translated into Swedish, Italian, Greek, Japanese, French and German.

Her book, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993) was awarded the 1994 Foundations Book Prize for best first book in political theory. Her second book, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001) was honored as the subject of an American Political Science Association theme panel in 2002, the chosen text for a faculty development seminar at John Carroll University, and the focus of the Feminist Theory/Women and Politics workshop at the Western Political Science Association meetings, 2005.

Honig recently completed her third book, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law and Democracy and is now working on a new project, tentatively titled: Antigone’s Anachronism? On Justice, Mourning, and the Politics of Burial, the first chapter of which will appear in Triquarterly Review (Spring/summer ‘08)

In addition, Honig is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995), co-editor with David Mapel of Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (Minnesota, 2002) and, most recently, co-editor with Anne Phillips and John Dryzek of the Oxford Handbook of Political Thought (Oxford, 2006). A former Book Review Editor for Political Theory, Honig is currently on several editorial boards, including Law and Social Inquiry and Ethics and Global Politics.

Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern in 1997. Honig was Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University.  Honig has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and, most recently, the American Philosophical Society.

(Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, M.Sc. London School of Economics), Professor of Political Science and Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation. She specializes in the areas of contemporary political theory, democratic theory and feminist theory. Her work covers a wide range of issues including the politics of legitimation, identity, authority, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. She is especially interested in the difference between agency-centered models of politics and those that are governance centered. She is the author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993) which was awarded the 1994 Foundations Book Prize for the best first book in political theory; Democracy and the Foreigner (2001); editor of Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995); and co-editor (with David Maple) of Skepticism, Individuality, and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (2002). Honig is a past recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and the Bunting Institute.

b-honig@northwestern.edu