Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman is an American writer and philosopher. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Berlin.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school in the general ferment of the late 60s. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre led her to study philosophy, first as a night student at City College of New York and later at Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. A Fulbright fellowship took her to Berlin, where she spent six years in the 80s. Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in Berlin at the time, won the PEN prize for a first work of non-fiction in 1992. From 1989-1995 she was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University, and from 1996-2000 she was associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she became director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.

Neiman’s books have been translated into many languages. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the mother of three grown children.

For further information, reviews and pdfs of shorter works see: www.susan-neiman.de