Chiara Cordelli is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her main areas of research are social and political philosophy, with a particular focus on theories of distributive justice, political legitimacy, normative defenses of the state, and the public/private distinction in liberal theory. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR political theory prize for best first book in political theory. She is also the co-editor of, and a contributor to, Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016). 

Cordelli’s articles and contributions to symposia appeared in the American Political Science Review, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Studies Review, as well as in several edited volumes, including NOMOS. One of her articles, “Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources” was included in the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2015 and her chapter “Philanthropy as a Duty of Reparative Justice” won the 2018 Review of Politics Award.

Cordelli earned her BA in philosophy from the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she studied aesthetics, critical theory, and the history of political thought. During her MA at University College London, she became interested in analytic philosophy. She earned her PhD in political philosophy from UCL in 2011. Before joining Chicago in 2015, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University (2011-2013) and a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Exeter, UK (2013-2015). She held visiting positions at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in D.C. (2009-2010), the Center for Human Values at Princeton (2014-2015), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2012-2013), the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard (2017-2018) and the LIER center at EHESS in Paris (2021-2022).