Jennifer London 

Jennifer London 

London

Jennifer London is a political theorist who focuses on the history of Western and Near Eastern political thought. Her upcoming book, tentatively titled Fighting for Inclusion in Autocracy, analyzes the earliest writings of Arabic prose and political theory. It documents how non-Arab Muslim secretaries crafted Islamic thought to represent their identities and thereby expanded the contours of their Islamic public spheres. During her fellowship year, London will widen her view to a global study of the history of equilibrium and its ethical foundations by comparing both the hierarchical structures of human relationships that appear across the relevant sources and the normative systems that legitimize those hierarchical structures across varied traditions. Such work is intended as an exemplary exercise in a combined study of global political theory and ethics that attends to historical contingency and the advantages of using diverse media. This book will suggest that it is high time for political theorists, who have spent decades focused on democracy and its history, to attend to the varied histories of autocratic thought, since much of the world does not live in democracy. London has taught political theory at Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Chicago. Her articles have recently appeared in the Annual Review of Political ScienceHistory of Political Thought, and in an edited volume, Comparative Political Theory in Space and Time. London holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University, and was a Faculty Fellow for the Association of Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies. Jennifer London is a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Berggruen Fellows

Fellows-in-Residence