Hanna Fenichel Pitkin was an American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Berlin and a resident of the United States since 1938, Hanna received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1961. After an appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she joined the political science faculty at Berkeley in 1966. In 1982, she was granted the Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley. She is best known for her seminal study “The Concept of Representation,” published in 1967.
Pitkin's diverse interests ranged from the history of European political thought from ancient to modern times, through ordinary language philosophy and textual analysis, to issues of political psychology and gender in political and social theory.
In 2003, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, one of the most prestigious awards in the field, "for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation." Established in 1995 by the Johan Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University in Sweden, the prize is known by many as the “Nobel Prize in Political Science”.