Jeff Spinner-Halev, Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics, received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before coming to UNC he was the Schlesinger Professor of Social Justice in the Political Science Department at the University of Nebraska. His research focuses on the tensions that arise within contemporary liberal and democratic theory, and between theory and practice. He is the author of The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (1994) and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (2000) and co-editor of Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (2005). His work has also been published in many book chapters and journals, including Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and Perspectives on Politics. His latest article, “Hinduism, Christianity, and Liberal Religious Toleration,” appeared in Political Theory (2005).

His current research project has a comparative cast (with India, Israel, and the U.S. as the main cases) and focuses on how and why certain kinds of injustices arise within or are inherited by liberal democracies are hard to overcome, and what might be done to alleviate them. Spinner-Halev has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, also at Hebrew University. He has served on the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association.