Iris Marion Young was an important political philosopher and contributor to feminist theory. Her work reached audiences in many disciplines and philosophical traditions. Here is the biography from the University of Chicago:

Iris Marion Young was Professor of Political Science. She was on the Faculty Boards of the Center for Gender Studies, the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Her specializations include theories of justice, democratic theory, and feminist theory. She studied each of these using ideas of twentieth century continental traditions such as Critical Theory, phenomenology, and deconstruction, as well as using ideas derived from Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

Young's books include Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 1990; Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy, Princeton University Press, 1997; Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2000 ; and forthcoming, On Female Body Experience, Oxford University Press, 2004. Her writings have been translated into several languages, including Catalan, Croatian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovakian, Spanish and Swedish.

Young's teaching interests range broadly, including global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory, including Foucault and Habermas; ethics and international affairs; gender, race and public policy.

Young was a visiting professor at the G.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and a visiting fellow at several institutions, including the Australian National University, the University of Waikato in New Zealand, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Young holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University, 1974. Before coming to the University of Chicago she taught political theory for nine years in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, and before then taught philosophy at several institutions, including the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Miami University.