Professor Bonnie Honig FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Honours
- FBA
Summary
Bonnie Honig, a political theorist from Montréal, Québec, earned her B.A. from Montreal’s Concordia University, her M.Sc., with Distinction, from the London School of Economics, and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
She has worked in the U.S. at Harvard, Northwestern, the American Bar Foundation, and Brown University with short term positions abroad at the Universities of Kent and Westminster, as Western Sydney University’s Thinking Out Loud lecturer, Centenary Fellow of the Scots Philosophical Association at University of Dundee, and José Ferrater Mora Lecturer, at University of Girona, Catalonia.
Honig’s work draws on political theory, literature, and film to recast questions of immigration, emergency, democracy, and gender in more agonistic and egalitarian terms.
Her first book, 1993’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, was named by 'The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory' as a key 20th century work of political theory and was recently reissued in a 30th anniversary edition.
After a 2008-9 sabbatical at Oxford University’s Nuffield College, she published 'Antigone, Interrupted', bringing legal studies, performance studies, feminist and queer theory into conversation with classics.
In Summer 2025, she took part in the Classics Collegium Phaenomenologicum, in Tuscany. Earlier in 2025, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leiden for her work in law and political theory.
She is the co-Founder of Brown University’s Democracy Project, leading the work on “Varieties of Democratic Experience”. Honig has written on the cultural politics of misogyny and has argued since 2013 for a politics of “public things” to orient democracy now.
The author of 70 articles and 11 single-authored books and (co)edited collections, she is now writing The Accidental Ordinary: Language, Politics, Metamorphosis, the topic of her 2026 lectures as Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and as Middlebrook/Djerassi Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at Cambridge University.