Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and of nine honorary degrees. In 2002 Elshtain received the Frank J. Goodnow award, the highest award for distinguished service to the profession given by the American Political Science Association. In 2006 President George W. Bush appointed her to the Council of the National Endowment of the Humanities. She has delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, joining a group that includes William James, Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2008 Elshtain received a second presidential appointment to the President’s Council on Bioethics. She has published more than five hundred essays and has authored or edited more than twenty books, including Democracy on Trial (1995), Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003), Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (2002), Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1996), Sovereignty: God, State, Self, and The Meaning of Marriage (2008). She holds an A.B. from Colorado State University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University.