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 in press. A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, May 2021) is based on her 2017 Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College. And Shellshocked: 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.
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.
Bonnie Honig.
A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Harvard University Press, 2021.
|
Bonnie Honig.
Shellshocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump. Fordham University Press, 2021.
|
Bonnie Honig. "12 Angry Men: Care for the Agon and the Varieties of Masculine Experience." theory&event, vol. 22, no. 3, 2019, pp. 701-716. |
Bonnie Honig. "What is Agonism?." Contemporary Political Theory, 2019. |
Bonnie Honig.
Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Fordham University Press, 2017.
|
Honig, B. "Public Things: Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Lars von Trier's Melancholia, and the Democratic Need." Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2015, pp. 623-636. |
Honig, B. "Three Models of Emergency Politics." boundary 2, vol. 41, no. 2, 2014, pp. 45-70. |
Honig, Bonnie. "Antigone, After the Fall”." Int class trad, vol. 21, no. 3, 2014, pp. 326-335. |
Bonnie Honig.
Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
|
Honig, Bonnie. "Juncture interview: Bonnie Honig." Public Policy Research, vol. 19, no. 4, 2013, pp. 226-234. |
Honig, B. "[Un]Dazzled by the Ideal?": Tully's Politics and Humanism in Tragic Perspective." Political Theory, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 138-144. |
Honig, B. "Review article: The politics of ethos: Stephen White The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009." European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 10, no. 3, 2011, pp. 422-429. |
Bonnie Honig, None. "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism." New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-33. |
Honig, B. "Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception." Political Theory, vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5-43. |
Honig, B. "Review Essay: What Foucault Saw at the Revolution: On the Use and Abuse of Theology for Politics." Political Theory, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 301-312. |
Bonnie Honig, None. "The Miracle of Metaphor: Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and Schmitt." diacritics, vol. 37, no. 2-3, 2008, pp. 78-102. |
HONIG, BONNIE. "Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory." American Political Science Review, vol. 101, no. 01, 2007, pp. 1. |
I work at the intersection of political theory and cultural studies, focusing on received scripts that limit or launch collective action in democratic settings. What are the necessary conditions of action in concert? How do inheritances of language, imagery, history, and ideas thwart or enable the defense of just institutions, and/or help to enable emancipatory actions and imagined alternatives to current unjust arrangements? Such questions motivate work I have done with the canon of political theory (Kant to Rawls), with the films of Lars von Trier, classical dramas from the Antigone to the Bacchae, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and more. Currently of interest to me – and orienting my work going forward -- are theoretical works by Deleuze and Guattari, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Adriana Cavarero.
Year | Degree | Institution |
---|---|---|
1989 | PhD | The Johns Hopkins University |
1981 | MSc | London School of Economics |
1980 | BA | Concordia University |
Affiliated Research Professor, American Bar Foundation, Chicago
Affiliate of the Digital Democracy Group, Simon Fraser University
Member, American Political Science Association
2013/14 Faculty board, Cogut Humanities Center, Brown University
2012 - Member, Editorial Board, Political Concepts
2009-2011 Program co-chair, 2011 APSA Annual Convention, Seattle, WA
2010 Member, editorial board, boundary2
2009, ongoing Future Citizenship Network, http://www.futurecitizenship.com
2008, ongoing Member, editorial board, Ethics & Global Politics, ed. Sofia Näsström Stockholm University.
2005, ongoing Honorary member, international advisory board, Culture and Politics: An International Journal of Theory
Political Theory, Book Review Editor, Political Theory, 2000 -- 2003.
Section Organizer, the Foundations of Political Thought panels for the 1999 American Political Science Association meetings.
I teach in the areas of Political theory, feminist theory, gender and cultural studies, the politics of film and literature. Some examples:
"Democracy Among the Ruins" is a course focused mostly on Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Melville's Moby-Dick.
Greek Tragedy in Politics, Literature and Film is a course focused on Sophocles' Antigone in its 5th c context and the role it plays in later philosophy, culture and film from the 19th tot he 21st centuries.
Graduate Courses on precarity and resilience include one on Hannah Arendt (co-taught with Ariella Azoulay) and another focused on Greek tragedy, Nietzsche and DW Winnicott.
GNSS 2020J - Pembroke Research Seminar in Feminist Theory: Anti-War! Theaters of War/Politics of Refusal |
HMAN 2400A - Politics and Literature |
HMAN 2400N - Care of the World, Between Politics and Theology |
MCM 0150 - Text/Media/Culture: Theories of Modern Culture and Media |
MCM 2310M - Politics and Literature |
POLS 2035 - Contemporary Political Theory |