Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, was named to the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. Professor Elshtain will spend five months as holder of the Kluge Chair while conducting research for her forthcoming book on the America cinema in the last half of the 2oth century.
Professor Elshtain has authored several books including Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press), Democracy on Trial (Basic Books), and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power In a Violent World (Basic Books).
Professor Elshtain is a native of Colorado and a graduate of Colorado State University. Professor Elshtain went on to earn a master’s degree in history as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Ph.D. in politics from Brandeis University. In 1973, she joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and taught there for 15 years. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1988 and was the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the university’s history. She was appointed to her current position at the University of Chicago in 1995.