Melissa Lane
- Politics
- Political Theory
Melissa Lane is Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Values and Public Life based in the University Center for Human Values. Her work is in political theory, with her principal expertise being ancient Greek political thought and its modern reception. She also works on a broad range of topics in the history of political thought and in normative theory and public ethics. She is a 2012 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and in 2012-13 is on leave from Princeton as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Professor Lane’s books include Eco-Republic; Plato's Progeny: How Plato and Socrates still captivate the modern mind; Method and Politics in Plato's Statesman; and a new 'Introduction' to the Penguin Classics volume of Plato's Republic (2007 edition). She has edited, with Martin A. Ruehl, A Poet's Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle (Camden House), in which her own contribution builds on archival work on the Circle's reading of Plato, and is currently editing, with Verity Harte, Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy for Cambridge University Press. She is a contributor to both The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (of which she was also an Associate Editor) and The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought. Her article on 'ancient political philosophy' was published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 2010. Current projects include the rule of knowledge in Platonic thought and the figure of the legislator in the history of political thought.
Before coming to Princeton, Professor Lane taught political thought in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and had studied as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Recent and current academic service includes the Spitz Prize Committee for the Conference for the Study of Political Thought (2012) and the Steering Committee of the Humanities Initiative for the Yad Hanadiv Foundation (2012-15).