Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. Born in Tokyo, she grew up in Japan and the UK. After earning her D.Phil from Oxford University in 1993, she taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics, where she was tenured in 2000. As a Fellow in Ethics and Political Philosophy at Yale University from 2007, she wrote three highly acclaimed books on Machiavelli. The biography BE LIKE THE FOX was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize and a BBC Book of the Week. In 2016-17 she was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University. Her new book ADVENTURES IN DEMOCRACY: The Turbulent World of People Power is coming out with Penguin Press in February 2024.
Benner is President of the European Society for the History of Political Thought (ESHPT), and a founding editor of the Brill series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought. She teaches at LSE Ideas in London and for academic programmes in several countries, and gives talks to both academic and general audiences around the world. Her writings have been translated into many languages including Simple and Complex Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, and Turkish.