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Jean Bethke Elshtain

Department of Government

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University, a three year visiting appointment in the Department of Government, in addition to her permanent position as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at The University of Chicago. She is also a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Berkley Center. A prominent public intellectual, Professor Elshtain studies the connections between ethical and political convictions.

 In 2006, she was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the same year, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. The lectures were published under the title Sovereignties: God, State, and Self (2008).

Professor Elshtain earned her B.A. and M.A. from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in Politics from Brandeis University in 1973. She taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, where she was the first woman to hold an endowed professorship, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a Guggenheim Fellow (1991-92), and held the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the Library of Congress in 2003-2004. She has also held visiting professor positions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University, and been awarded nine honorary degrees. Professor Elshtain was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.

Professor Elshtain’s works have focused on the intersections of religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought. Her recent books include Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003), which argued that America’s war against terrorism is not only necessary but also ethical, and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (2000), a combination of political analysis and cultural critique that explores what it means to be human and the tensions of personhood in the Twenty-First Century. In her role as Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair at Georgetown, Professor Elshtain is giving a series of lectures and courses on democracy and the principles of free institutions. The author of more than five hundred essays in scholarly journals and journals of civic opinion, Professor Elshtain is also a contributing editor for The New Republic. She currently serves as co-chair of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and as Chair of the Council on Families in America.