Sherif Girgis

Sherif Girgis was born in Cairo and grew up in Delaware. He majored in philosophy at Princeton, where he won several academic prizes, including the 2007 Dante Prize for the nation’s best undergraduate essay on Dante. His senior thesis on sex ethics won the Princeton prizes for best thesis in ethics and best thesis in philosophy. Upon graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 2008, he went on to earn a master’s degree in moral, political and legal philosophy at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He is now pursing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton and his JD at Yale Law School. His paper “What Is Marriage?”, coauthored with Robert George and Ryan Anderson, was published in December and quickly became Social Science Research Network’s most downloaded paper of the previous year. In 2012, Girgis, George and Anderson published an expanded version of the paper as a book, titled What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. In addition to publishing in more popular contexts, he has given lectures and talks and engaged in debates on marriage and related topics throughout the United States and abroad.