Mulcahy Conway Associates

Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane is Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Values and Public Life at Princeton University, a position she has held since 2009. Previously she taught for fifteen years at the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in Philosophy and was a Fellow of King’s College. She is a dual national of the US and the UK. Her specialty is ancient Greek political thought and particularly the thought of Plato, and its relevance to the modern world, as expressed in her book Eco-Republic (2011 Peter Lang – UK / 2012 Princeton University Press – USA). Her status as a scholar of Greek thought is attested by authoring the article on ‘Ancient Political Philosophy’ in the prestigious online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and introducing Plato’s Republic in the 2007 Penguin edition.

Melissa Lane has a long record of public and private sector talks and consultations in both the UK and the US as an interpreter of ethics and political thought for a public audience, and continues to be a contributor to UK media including ‘Philosophy Bites’ podcasts and ‘In Our Time’. Recent plaudits include the award of a 2012 Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a 2012-13 Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Her other books include serving as co-editor of A Poet’s Reich (Camden House 2011); authoring Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth 2001); and authoring Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge 1998). She is in the unusual position of having been a contributor and associate editor of the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge 2000) and also a contributor to the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (2003), for a piece commended in the Economist’s review of the volume – another conference paper was mentioned in the New York Times.

She has been Visiting Professor of Government and Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University; Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge; and a Visiting Fellow of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Melissa Lane is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. She holds an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University and an M.Phil. and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, a Truman Scholar, and the Mary Isabel Sibley Scholar supported by Phi Beta Kappa.