News

Professor Melissa Lane has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 2012, for a project on ‘The Rule of Knowledge: Platonic Psychology and Politics.’ 

In 2012-13, she will be on leave from Princeton University as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.   From 2012 for three years, she will serve on the Steering Committee of the Hanadiv Humanities Initiative organized by the Yad Hanadiv Foundation in Israel.   

Just published is her article ‘The Origins of the Statesman – Demagogue Distinction in and after Ancient Athens,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 73: 2 (2012), 179-200.  

Research Interests

With an A.B. summa cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard, and an M.Phil. and PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall, Truman, and Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Professor Lane’s work has focused on the history of political thought and political philosophy, with distinctive strength in ancient Greek political thought while spanning both the ancients and the moderns.  This wide range is reflected in the fact that she is a contributor to both the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (2000), of which she was also an Associate Editor, and the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (2003).

Professor Lane’s expertise in the area of ancient political theory is widely recognized, building on her books Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge, 1998) and Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates still captivate the modern mind (Duckworth, 2001), and her Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Plato’s Republic (2007).  Professor Lane’s third book, Eco-Republic, appeared in autumn 2011 from Peter Lang in the UK and in early 2012 from Princeton University Press in the United States.

Also published in autumn 2011 is A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle with Camden House, co-edited with Martin A. Ruehl. Most recently published is the article ‘Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner's Genealogical Turn,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 73:1 (2012): 71-82. 

Eco-Republic
What the Ancients Can Teach Us about
Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living

By Melissa Lane

Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Professor Lane is interviewed in a podcast about Plato and sustainability, the theme of the book, on ‘Philosophy Bites’:  http://philosophybites.com/2011/12/melissa-lane-on-plato-and-sustainability.html

A review in Science can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6070/797.full

In 2011-12, Professor Lane gives papers at Harvard, Yale, Institute for Historical Research (London), University of Bamberg, Charles University (Prague), Venice, and Cambridge; lectures in the 2011-2012 Saul O Sidore Lecture Symposium, “Sustainability Unbound,” at the University of New Hampshire; and teaches a short course on knowledge and politics at the University of Cologne.

At Princeton, Professor Lane is Director of the Program in Values and Public Life of the University Center for Human Values, and a core participant in an interdisciplinary Research Community on ‘Communicating Uncertainty: Science, Institutions, and Ethics in the Politics of Global Climate Change,’ supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  She is also a core participant in the new Popular Sovereignty research network funded by the AHRC in the UK, meeting three times in 2012-13.   She has been elected to the Executive Council of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association for a three year term.

Office hours, 2011-12: via http://wass.princeton.edu (search for Lane).  

© 2011 Faculty of Politics, Princeton University