Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, has received the 2024 Book Prize from the Journal of the History of Philosophy for her book, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton University Press, 2023). The award-winning publication examines Plato’s thoughts on the accountability of those in power.
Dr. Lane first joined the faculty of Princeton’s department of politics in 2009. Alongside her primary appointment, she holds affiliations with the department of classics and the department of philosophy. Earlier in her tenure with Princeton, she had stints as director of the University Center for Human Values and as director of the program in values and public life.
Currently, Dr. Lane is on a one-year leave from Princeton to serve in a variety of roles at institutions in the United Kingdom, including service as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow with Corpus Christi College. Additionally, she is in the midst of a three-year term as the 50th Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London.
As a political theorist, Dr. Lane centers her scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman political thought and its modern reception, while also extending to issues in contemporary normative theory focused around knowledge and accountability. She has published several books, including Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (Bristol Classical Press, 2001) and Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Dr. Lane is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in social studies. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in England.