Melissa Williams

Melissa S. Williams (born 1960) is an American political theorist who is a Professor at the University of Toronto. She specialises in democratic theory and comparative political theory. She was the founding director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics.

She gained an MESc from Bryn Mawr College and AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University. Her PhD thesis won the American Political Science Association's Leo Strauss Award. which won a First Book Award in political theory or political philosophy from the American Political Science Association in 1999. She has been editor of the journal NOMOS of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

Selected publications Books Melissa S. Williams. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation (Princeton University Press; 1998, 2000) David Kahane, Daniel Weinstock, Dominique Leydet, Melissa Williams, eds. Deliberative Democracy in Practice (University of British Columbia Press; 2010) Melissa Williams. Equality: A Critical Introduction (Routledge; 2014) Joseph Chan, Doh Chull Shin, Melissa S. Williams, eds. East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide (Cambridge University Press; 2016) Essays and research papers Melissa S. Williams (1995). Justice toward groups: Political not juridical. Political Theory 23: 67–91 Melissa S. Williams. "Citizenship as Identity, Citizenship as Shared Fate, and the Functions of Multicultural Education" in Kevin McDonough, Walter Feinberg (eds), Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities (Oxford University Press; 2003)