Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry.

A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D. from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town and Nuffield College, Oxford.

His most recent books are The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The First Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (with Michael Graetz), The Moral Foundations of Politics, and The State of Democratic Theory. His new book, Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror, is now available from Princeton University Press. His current research deals with the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.

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