Melissa S. Williams, Council University of Toronto

Melissa S. Williams, University of Toronto
Council 2006-08

Melissa S. Williams is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. She is also Editor of NOMOS, the Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.  Williams teaches in the history of Western political thought, contemporary democratic theory, feminist theory, American political thought, and ethics in the public sphere.

Williams’s research is predominantly in contemporary democratic theory; it frequently addresses core concepts in political philosophy through the lens of group-structured inequality, social and political marginalization, and cultural and religious diversity. Her first book, Voice, Trust and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton University Press, 1998), develops a theoretical defense of descriptive representation for historically marginalized groups. It won the Foundations of Political Theory Section’s award for the best first book in political philosophy.  More recent work has addressed the relationship between peace and justice in the liberal theory of toleration; conceptions of citizenship in an era of globalization; and justice for indigenous peoples. Williams currently has two book projects under way: Equality, for the Routledge Series on Concepts in Political Philosophy; and Reconstructing Impartiality, which begins from feminist and difference-based critiques of liberal impartiality and seeks to develop an alternative account of “situated” or “contextual” impartiality within law-governed relationships. She has published thirty articles on these and other topics in Political Theory, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, numerous edited volumes, and other international journals. 

Williams has also co-edited a number of works:  Identity, Rights and Constitutional Transformation (1999; with Patrick Hanafin); Political Exclusion and Domination (NOMOS XLVI, 2005, with Stephen Macedo); Humanitarian Intervention (NOMOS XLVII, 2005, with Terry Nardin); Toleration and Its Limits (NOMOS XLVIII, forthcoming, with Jeremy Waldron); and Moral Universalism and Pluralism (NOMOS XLIX, forthcoming, with Henry Richardson).Williams was Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (1996-97), Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (2000), and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University (2000-2001). A former winner of the Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy, she has served APSA as a member of the Leo Strauss Award Committee as well as on the Foundations of Political Thought Section’s First Book Award Committee. She is a regular and active participant in ASPA meetings.