Biography
Judith Shklar was born in Riga, Latvia to Jewish parents who fled the Soviet Union when she was thirteen. She graduated from McGill University and received B.A and M.A. degrees in 1949 and 1950. She received her Ph.D degree from Harvard University in 1955.
After graduation, Shklar became a faculty member at Harvard University and spent her entire academic career there. She was the first tenured woman in Harvard's Government Department. She was also president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and president of the American Political Science Association.
She was a renowned teacher and advisor, and many of her former students contributed to a volume of essays on her thought, Liberalism Without Illusions, edited by Bernard Yack.
Read more about this topic: Judith N. Shklar
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)