Danielle Allen

Danielle S. Allen (born 1971) is an American classicist and political scientist. She is a professor in the Government Department at Harvard University and at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 2015, Allen was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Starting January 1, 2017, She will be appointment as James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty honor.

Allen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with an A.B. in Classics in 1993. As a Marshall Scholar, she went on to earn an M.Phil. degree (1994), and a Ph.D. in Classics (1996) from King's College, Cambridge University. She then pursued graduate studies at Harvard, earning an A.M. in 1998 and a Ph.D. in 2001. From 1997 to 2007 she served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, rising through the academic ranks to become a professor of both classics and political science, as well as a member of the Committee on Social Thought. She organized The Dewey Seminar: Education, Schools and the State, with Rob Reich.

She is former trustee of Amherst Collegeand is chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. She spent the next eight years as the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, before joining the Harvard faculty and becoming director of the Safra Center in 2015.

Her scholarly contributions have been widely recognized. She was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2001, in recognition of her combining “the classicist’s careful attention to texts and language with the political theorist’s sophisticated and informed engagement.” An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, she chairs the Mellon Foundation board of trustees, is a past chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, and has served as a trustee of both Amherst College and Princeton University.

In addition to her teaching and scholarship, Allen has become an integral University citizen since her return to Harvard. She serves as co-chair of the newly appointed University-wide task force on inclusion and belonging, and is a member of both the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the University’s Advisory Committee on Honorary Degrees. She has also been recognized for her outstanding teaching, earning high Q scores from Harvard students and having received the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

• 1993 Marshall Scholar
• 2001 Quantrell Award for Excellence
• 2002 MacArthur Fellows Program
• 2009 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2016 James Bryant Conant University Professor

• Fournier, Arthur, "Danielle Allen, Associate Professor in Classical Languages & Literatures", chronicle.uchicago.edu, May 24, 2001.

• "It's Up to Obama", Democracy Issue #16, Spring 2010
• The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens, 2000, (reprint Princeton University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-691-09489-2)
• Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. the Board of Education, University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-226-01466-1
• Why Plato Wrote, John Wiley & Sons, Limited, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4443-3448-7
• Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Liveright, 2014, ISBN 978-0871406903
• From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, University of Chicago Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-26212-3