Melissa Lane

Philosopher and political theorist Melissa Lane is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and an associated faculty member in the Department of Classics and the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University. She is also co-convenor of Princeton's Climate Futures Initiative and serves on the executive committee of Princeton’s Program in Classical Philosophy. Lane's work has focused on the history of political thought and political philosophy, with distinctive strength in ancient Greek political thought while spanning the ancients and the moderns.

she focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, especially the writings of Plato, and she also works on the reception and uses of Plato, informing work which she also does in contemporary political theory, including especially on issues in regard to scientific knowledge, communication, and climate change.  

Lane is a participant in and contributor to public discourse and academic life on both sides of the Atlantic. After receiving her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, she studied at Cambridge University as a Marshall, Truman, and Phi Beta Kappa scholar, graduating with an M.Phil and Ph.D. in Philosophy. She then taught for 15 years in the Faculty of History and as a Fellow of King’s College. She continues to play an active role in British public intellectual life, notably as the 50th Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London.

Lane is the only person ever to have delivered at the University of Oxford both the Carlyle Lectures, in history and politics and international relations, and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures, in philosophy. Among her other honors: a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize; the role of Professeure invitée in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure; and the Lucy Shoe Meritt Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Her monograph, Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

She has been invited to deliver the 2029 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at UC Berkeley.