Sheila Kassman Memorial Lecture: Situating the Roles of Lawgivers in Plato's 'Laws'

Professor Melissa Lane

at Princeton University

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has won the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award.  In 2024-25 she is in the UK on sabbatical: in the fall of 2024, at Oxford as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor, and in the winter and spring of 2025, in London as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies and the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy and as an Honorary Visiting Professor of Philosophy at UCL. Throughout this academic year she is also continuing her three-year term of delivering public lectures as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College.  She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure. Professor Lane completed an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. The only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford, she has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany.