Leuphana awards honorary doctorate to Silvia Federici
During this year's dies academicus on 4 July 2018, Leuphana University of Lüneburg handed over an honorary doctorate award from the Faculty of Cultural Studies to Emerita Professor Silvia Federici. With this award, the faculty honours the scholar for her ground-breaking academic achievements, as well as for her lifelong political, feminist and social commitment.
Professor Silvia Federici is one of the most influential female scholars in the field of Marxist-feminist cultural theories and has opened up new fields of research for cultural research at international level by coining the term ‘reproduction work’. Her works, above all her canonical book ‘Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’ (2004), are now an integral part of social science research, but are also attracting great attention in the fields of science and art far beyond.
Silvia Federici, who was one of the founding members of the International Feminist Collective in 1972, is an outstanding intellectual personality and, as such, stands out for her influence on civil society in the fields of education, human rights and alternative economic models in the sense of the ‘commons’. Her work is not only a central point of reflection of contemporary cultural theories, but also points to the avenues opened up by interdisciplinarily conceived science.
The person:
Silvia Federici was born in Italy in 1942. She went to the USA in the 1960s and received her doctorate from the University of Buffalo (USA) in 1980. She taught at Port Harcourt University in Nigeria and later became Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at New College at Hofstra University in New York. She is now emerita.