Danielle Allen: Political Equality as a Human Good

Date: 

Monday, March 20, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:45pm

Location: 

Harvard Kennedy School: Allison Dining Room


Danielle AllenJames Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University.

Danielle AllenAbout the speaker

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. 

Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), and Education and Equality (2016). She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light).

A 2001 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians. Our Declaration was awarded the 2015 Francis Parkman Prize and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for nonfiction, and Allen is also a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.

Professor Allen was educated at Princeton (AB, 1993), Cambridge (PhD, 1996) and Harvard (PhD, 2000). Before taking up the Directorship of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, she was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and before that, served as Dean of the Division of Humanities and Professor of Political Science, Classical Languages and Literature, and of the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. In addition to her academic service, Professor Allen has served as a member and Chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, Vice Chair and Chair of the Mellon Foundation board, and a member of the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs Board. 

Learn more about Danielle Allen's work
scholar.harvard.edu/danielleallen

Registration Closed
See also: Spring 2017