Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University. She directed the University Center for Human Values from 2016-2024. An associated faculty member in the Princeton Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy, she researches and teaches in the area of the history of political thought, with a special expertise in ancient Greek thought, and in normative political philosophy, including especially environmental ethics and politics.   

Her books include The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter (PUP, 2015; originally published in the UK and Commonwealth as Greek and Roman Political Ideas, Penguin, 2014); Eco-Republic (PUP, 2012; Peter Lang, 2011, in the UK and Commonwealth); Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth, 2001); and Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (CUP, 1998).  She co-edited Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (with Verity Harte, 2013), and A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle (with Martin A. Ruehl, 2011). At Princeton, she was the first director of the Program in Values and Public Life, and is co-chair of the Steering Committee for Service and Civic Engagement and of the Climate Futures Initiative.  

She received a Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize in 2015.  Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009, she taught in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA). 

Professor Lane earned a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in Social Studies from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, and an M.Phil and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa. For more information, click here.