Sigal Ben-Porath
University of Pennsylvania
MRMJJ Presidential Professor
Year Elected
2025
Membership status
Regular
Sigal Ben-Porath is the MRMJJ Presidential Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a member of the philosophy and the political science departments, and the faculty director of the SNF Paideia Program for civic dialogue. She received her doctorate in political philosophy from Tel-Aviv university in 2000, and was a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, The Institute for Advanced Studies, Tel-Aviv University's Safra Center for Ethics, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Her recent books are Cancel Wars (Chicago 2023), Free Speech on Campus (Penn Press, 2017) as well as Making Up Our Mind (with Michael Johanek, Chicago 2019). She chaired Penn's Committee on Open Expression 2015-2019, and serves on the boards of the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia, Middlebury's Conflict Transformation Center, and Penn's Project for Philosophy for the Young. In the past decade she has been offering guidance to college campuses on policy development and responses to controversies surrounding speech.