Roxanne L. Euben is a political theorist whose research has helped pioneer a relatively new area of inquiry sometimes called comparative political theory. This is an understanding of political theory not as coextensive with Euro-American canonical texts ‘from Plato to NATO,’ but as inclusive of traditions, experiences, perspectives and practices associated with the so-called non-West and global South, as well as of indigenous traditions in but not of “the West.” Comparative political theory also entails critical analysis of the history and politics of such categories as West, East, non-West, etc. This includes: investigating the political work that they do; the historical entanglements they obscure; the cross-pollination they erase; the internal coherence they often presuppose; and the comparisons they tend to naturalize.
Euben’s particular area of research is Muslim and Euro-American political thought, and her scholarship has addressed such topics as Muslim cosmopolitanism; jihad; martyrdom and political action; travel, translation and the production of knowledge; gender and travel; shared perspectives on science and reason; visual and verbal rhetorics of humiliation; and digital time.
Euben is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999), Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, (Princeton, 2006), and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, 2009), written and edited in collaboration with Muhammad Qasim Zaman of Princeton University. She has been published in a range of scholarly journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, International Studies Review, Common Knowledge, Current History, Theory & Event, and Political Psychology.
Euben's honors include fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2016-17), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012-13), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2004-5), the American Council of Learned Societies (2000-1) and the Mellon Foundation (2002), and her work was awarded the Frank L. Wilson Best American Political Science Association Paper Prize (2005). She taught previously at Wellesley College, where she was the Ralph Emerson and Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of Political Science, and began her teaching career at the University of South Carolina, Columbia in 1995, the year she received a Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. She has received two teaching awards, the Pinanski Teaching Prize, Wellesley College (2003) and the Excellence in Teaching Award, University of South Carolina (1996).