Linda M. G. Zerilli

While at CASBS, Linda M. G. Zerilli will work on a book-length manuscript titled Feminism and the Democratic Imaginary. Writing as a feminist political theorist, Zerilli seeks to broaden the task of critical feminist historiography to animate action and judgment in the present. Focusing on power struggles in historical and contemporary feminisms over periodization, temporality, and the feminist past, the project stages new conversations about time, history, and politics among thinkers ranging from Hannah Arendt, Reinhard Koselleck, and Cornelius Castoriadis to Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers.

Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship focuses on democratic theory, feminist theory, and aesthetics and politics. She is the author of A Democratic Theory of Truth (2025), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (2016), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (2005), and Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (1994). Zerilli has been a two-time Institute for Advanced Study member, a Fulbright Fellow, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. In 2025, she was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize for her scholarship. Zerilli’s writings can be found at her website: https://chicago.academia.edu/LZerilli