In 2013–14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15.

In 2012, her previous book, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2009) was awarded the David Easton Prize.

[5] Also in 2012, she won the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory for "Ismene's Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles' Antigone," published in Arethusa.

In doing so, she aims to shift the question from how to deal with foreigners to “What problems does foreignness solve for us?” This strategy of subverting binary oppositions (such as contestation vs. consensus, foreignness vs. familiarity, decision vs. deliberation, and in her third book Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2009), normality vs. exception) by shifting the question of a well-known debate in order to obtain a new and revealing perspective, recurs throughout her work and the insights that result constitute her distinctive contributions to political theory.

In Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Honig intervenes in the recent turn to mourning and lamentation in political theory and cultural studies.