Elizabeth K. Markovits

Elizabeth Markovits is the author of Future Freedoms: Intergenerational Justice, Democratic Theory, and Ancient Greek Tragedy & Comedy (Routledge, 2018) and The Politics of Sincerity: Plato, Frank Speech, and Democratic Judgment (Penn State University Press, 2008). She has also published articles on rhetoric and politics (Journal of Political Philosophy and POROI), as well as on problems of participatory parity for women in the contemporary United States (co-authored with Susan Bickford, Perspectives on Politics).

Her most recent book, Future Freedoms, explores the difficulties of intergenerational justice and claims to sovereign freedom through a study of Greek tragedy and comedy. Her essay on intergenerational dynamics in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy was published in the American Political Science Review in 2010. She also published an essay on old age, flattery, and its relation to frank speech in Aristophanes’ Knights, in Polis: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought in 2012.

Markovits currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the American Political Science Review, PS, and Political Research Quarterly, and was the Executive Co-Director for the interdisciplinary Association for Political Theory from 2007-2010. A 2014 winner of the Mount Holyoke College Teaching Award, she has been involved in a number of curricular initiatives across the College, including the Teaching & Learning Initiative, the First Year Seminar program, Senior Symposium, Women in Public Service, civic engagement, NEXUS, and Lynk. Within the Politics Department, she teaches a variety of courses, ranging from upper-level seminars on such topics as rhetoric and justice to introductory feminist theory to ancient Greek thought to first-year seminars. She is currently serving as the associate dean of faculty, focusing on faculty development, assessment, faculty work/life, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.