Melissa Lane is a full professor of politics at Princeton University,^[1] a position she has held since 2009.^[2] Prior to this, she was a Senior Research Fellow^[2] of King's College, Cambridge and Associate Director of their Centre for History and Economics. She was a lecturer at Cambridge from 1994 to 2009.^[2] Her expertise is in political theory.^[3]

Academic career

She graduated from Harvard University 'summa cum laude' with a degree in Social Studies. As a Marshall, Truman, and Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Lane went on to earn an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge where she was a Marshall Scholar.^[4]

Publications

Books

• Plato’s Progeny: How Socrates and Plato still captivate the modern mind. Duckworth, 2001.
• Method and Politics in Plato's Statesman. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Reviewed in
• Greek and Roman Political Ideas (Pelican Books, 2014) ISBN 978-0141976150.

Selected peer-reviewed journal articles

• "The evolution of eironeia in classical Greek texts: why Socratic eironeia is not Socratic irony", Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31 (2006) 49–83.
• "Argument and Agreement in Plato’s Crito", History of Political Thought 19:3 (1998) 313–330.
• "The utopianism of Hamilton’s state of needs: on rights, deliberation, and the nature of politics", South African Journal of Philosophy 25 (2006) 207–213.
• "Why History of Ideas At All?", History of European Ideas 28:1–2 (2002) 33–41.
• "States of Nature, Epistemic and Political", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1998–1999) 1–24.
• "Plato, Popper, Strauss, and Utopianism: Open Secrets?", History of Philosophy Quarterly 16:2 (April 1999) 119-42

Honours

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Gresham Professor of Rhetoric 2023