Jean Bethke Elshtain
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics
University of Chicago
Jean Bethke Elshtain is a political philosopher whose task has been to
show the connections between our political and our ethical convictions.
She received her Ph.D. in politics from Brandeis University in 1973 and
then joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In 1988, she became the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in
the history of Vanderbilt University. She was appointed to her current
position at the University of Chicago in 1995 and has been a visiting
professor at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University.
Professor Elshtain was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1996. Her books include Public Man, Private Woman:
Women in Social and Political Thought, Meditations on Modern Political
Thought, and Democracy on Trial. She has been a Fellow at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, a Scholar in Residence for the Rockefeller
Foundation Bellagio Conference and Study Center in Como, Italy, and a
Guggenheim Fellow. She is the recipient of the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award
for excellence in classroom teaching--the highest award for undergraduate
teaching at Vanderbilt. She served as a member of the Board of Trustees
of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and is on the Board of
Trustees of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park in
North Carolina. She has an appointment to the Board of the Illinois
Humanities Council.
Professor Elshtain gave our Arthur J. Schmitt lecture in the autumn of 2004.
