Bonnie Honig

Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science

Areas of Interest: Political theory and cultural studies, focusing on received scripts that limit or launch collective action in democratic settings.

Biography

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy(Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted. (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair(Fordham, 2017). She has edited or co-edited several collections, including Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995) and Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford, 2016).  Her articles have appeared in Arethusa (Okin-Young Prize for best article in feminist theory), New Literary History, Political Theory, theory&event, Social Text, differences, the American Political Science Review, and more.  

Honig has two new books. A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, May 2021) is based on her 2017 Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College. And Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, March 2021) collects revised versions of her public writing since 2016 along with several new essays on criticism, feminism, and politics. Interviews with Honig about her recent work appear in The Nation and Polity; also podcasts, with the Cogut Institute's Meeting Street and Why We Argue.

In 2017-18 she served as the Inaugural Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar, and she is currently an affiliate of the Digital Democracy Group at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.