THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She was the 2010-16 Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, where she continues as a leading scholar and teacher in the field. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), A Democratic Theory of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a two-time Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, and a Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow. Zerilli was awarded a 2025 Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2016, Professor Zerilli won the University faculty award for excellence in graduate teaching and mentoring. She has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and the advisory boards of The American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture,Theory and Critique.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
A Democratic Theory of Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
"Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts." Le foucaldien 6, no. 1 (2020): 2, 1–22.
A Democratic Theory Of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
"The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment," New Literary History 46, no. 2 (2015).
"Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment: Farewell to Public Reason," Political Theory 40, No. 1 (February 2012): 6-32.
"Towards a Feminist Theory of Judgment," Signs 34, No. 2 (Winter 2009).
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
"We Feel Our Freedom': Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt," Political Theory 33, No. 2 (April 2005): 158-88.
"This Universalism Which is Not One," Diacritics 28, No. 2 (August 1998): 3-20.
"Doing without Knowing: Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary," Political Theory 24, No. 4 (August 1998): 435-58.