Spinoza Lectures 2026

Bonnie Honig, Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, will hold the Spinoza Chair this year. Her research uses political theory, literature, law, and film to reframe issues surrounding immigration, states of emergency, democracy, and gender in more agonistic and egalitarian terms.

About Bonnie Honig

Bonnie Honig is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media, as well as Political Science, at Brown University. She rethinks issues surrounding immigration, states of emergency, democracy, and gender in more agonistic and egalitarian terms through her research on political theory, literature, law, and film.

Honig is the author of numerous influential books, including Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993); Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001); Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009); Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013); Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017), A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021), and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, 2021), a collection of revised versions of her public essays since 2016.

As the co-founder of the Democracy Project at Brown University and the director of the Varieties of Democratic Experience research program, Honig has written extensively on the cultural politics of misogyny. Since 2013, she has advocated for a politics of "public things" as a guiding principle for contemporary democracy. Honig has published approximately seventy articles and eleven books and has served as co-editor of several collections. She is currently working on The Accidental Ordinary: Language, Politics, Metamorphosis, which will be the theme of her lectures in 2026 as the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

Spinoza Chair 1995-present
 

2025 - Jennifer Lackey (Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known en Stories that Wrong and Stories that Repair)
2024 - Paul C. Taylor (registration of lectures: Reconsidering the Racial Reckoning and What is wrong with Antiracism)
2023 - Linda Martín Alcoff (registration of lectures: Extractivism as a model for Modern Epistemology and A Decolonial Dialogic Approach as a Corrective Epistemology)
2022 - Charles Mills (Charles Mills passed away in late 2021, Lewis R. Gordon and Philomena Essed spoke in his place)
2021 - Robert Brandom (registration of lectures: A Rortyan Pragmatist Master-Argument and Hegel’s Recollective Account of Representation)
2019 - Catherine Malabou (registration of lectures: Beyond the 'archic' Principle and Morality and Horizontality)
2018 - Susan Wolf (registration of lectures: Aesthetic Responsibility and Selves Like Us)
2017 - Béatrice Longuenesse (registration of lectures: Perplexing I and Two unlikely bedfellows: Kant and Freud on Morality)
2016 - Jonathan Lear
2015 - Sally Haslanger
2014 - Quentin Skinner
2013 - Onora O’Neill 
2012 - Michael Friedmann
2011 - Cristina Lafont
2010 - Moira Gatens
2009 - Robert Pippin
2008 - Asma Barlas
2007 - Herman De Dijn, Jonathan Israel en Steven Nadler
2006 - John Dupré 
2005 - Bruno Latour 
2004 - Nancy Fraser
2003 - Hubert Dreyfus 
2002 - Judith Butler 
2001 - Hilary Putnam 
2000 - Seyla Benhabib 
1999 - Axel Honneth 
1998 - Stanley Cavell 
1997 - Richard Rorty 
1996 - Albrecht Wellmer 
1995 - Manfred Frank, Daniel C. Dennett en Will Kymlicka

Publications

The following texts of the Spinoza Lectures have been published by Van Gorcum: