Adapted from a story by Liz Fuller-Wright and Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications, on the University homepage
Melissa Lane (Politics) is among seven Princeton faculty members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for distinguished work in their disciplines. She joins 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, policy, research and science who were elected to the academy this year in their respective fields.
“We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence — this is a fitting commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Academy President Laurie Patton in the academy’s 2026 announcement of new members. “The founding of the nation and the Academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the public good.”
Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton and the former director of the University Center for Human Values, is a specialist in ancient Greek political thought and the ethics and politics of climate change. She is currently giving a multiyear series of distinguished public lectures at Gresham College in London, focused on how ancient Greek ideas shape the modern political imagination. Her most recent book, “Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political,” won the 2024 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize.
Next fall, she will co-teach the Humanities Sequence “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture,” in the Program in Humanistic Studies. This will be her third time team-teaching the double-credit course which examines Western history, philosophy, and literature from antiquity to the 20th century.
Lane received her bachelor’s from Harvard University and her Ph.D. and MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Her previous honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ancient Studies Residency at the American Academy in Rome, a visiting professorship at the École Normale Supérieure, and Princeton’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize, among others.
