Nancy Hirschmann

Nancy J. Hirschmann is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the faculty in 2002 after serving for 12 years as Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and previously at Swarthmore College. Hirschmann has held prominent leadership roles, including Vice-President of the American Political Science Association, Vice Chair of the Department of Political Science, Director of the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women. She earned her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the history of political thought, particularly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; feminist theory; analytical philosophy; disability theory; and the intersection of political theory and public policy issues related to gender, sexuality, and disability rights. She is an expert on the concept of freedom.

Hirschmann is the author of influential books including Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory (Cornell University Press, 1992), The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2003)—recipient of the 2004 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on women and politics—, Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (co-edited with Beth Linker, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). She has co-edited additional volumes such as Women and Welfare: Theory and Practice in the U.S. and Europe (Rutgers University Press, 2001), Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Disability and Political Theory (co-edited with Barbara Arneil, Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Hypatia, Constellations, and Politics & Gender. Hirschmann has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center (2017), European University Institute (Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow, 2018), Institute for Advanced Study, Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Princeton University Center for Human Values. She was named Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences in 2018 and serves on editorial boards of the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Politics & Gender, Hypatia, and the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research.

Professional Email: njh@sas.upenn.edu