Danielle Allen

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.

Danielle Susan Allen (born 1971) is an American classicist and political scientist. She is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, where she is also the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 2015, Allen was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As of January 1, 2017, she is also James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty honor. Allen is the daughter of political scientist William B. Allen.

The New Yorker published Allen's "The Life of a South Central Statistic" in its July 24, 2017 issue.

She is former trustee of Amherst College and is a past 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, Allen is a past chair of the Mellon Foundation board of trustees and a past chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, and has served as a trustee of both Amherst College and Princeton University.

Allen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with an A.B. in Classics in 1993. She completed a 178-page long senior thesis, titled "The State of Judgment", under the supervision of Andre Laks. 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, and she served as Dean of the Division of the Humanities from 2004 to 2007. She organized The Dewey Seminar: Education, Schools and the State, with Rob Reich.