Danielle Allen

Danielle Susan Allen (born November 3, 1971) is an American classicist and political scientist.

She is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University.

She is also the former Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Allen was born in 1971 in Takoma Park, Maryland.

She is the daughter of political scientist William B. Allen.

Her mother was a librarian and her parents married at a time when interracial marriage was illegal.

Her ancestors were slaves and she is mixed-raced.

Allen's grandfather was a Baptist preacher who helped found the first NAACP chapter in North Florida and her great-grandmother was a suffragette.

Allen attended Claremont High School in California.

She then matriculated at Princeton University, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in classics, summa cum laude, in 1993 with membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Allen completed a senior thesis titled "The State of Judgment" under the supervision of Andre Laks.

Allen received a Marshall Scholarship to study at King's College at the University of Cambridge, where she received an Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in classics in 1994 and 1996, respectively.

Her dissertation was titled "A Situation of Punishment: The Politics and Ideology of Athenian Punishment".

From 1997 to 2007, she served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, earning appointments as a professor of both classics and political science, as well as membership on the university's Committee on Social Thought.

Allen then pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University, earning a Master of Arts (M.A.) in government in 1998 and a Ph.D. in government in 2001.

Her second dissertation was titled "Intricate Democracy: Hobbes, Ellison, and Aristotle on Distrust, Rhetoric, and Civic Friendship".

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.

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.

She is a former trustee of Amherst College and Princeton University, and is a past chair of the Pulitzer Prize board where she served from 2007 to 2015.

Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 2015, Allen was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Allen is the daughter of political scientist William B. Allen.

She was 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.

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

Together with Stephen B. Heintz and Eric Liu, Allen chaired the bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Allen was a contributing columnist at The Washington Post until she announced in December 2020 that she was exploring a run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2022.

She formally announced her campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in June 2021, but then dropped out of the race in February 2022.

The commission, which was launched "to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life and to enable more Americans to participate as effective citizens in a diverse 21st-century democracy", issued a report, titled Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, in June 2020.

The report included strategies and policy recommendations "to help the nation emerge as a more resilient democracy by 2026".

In October 2022, Allen joined the Council for Responsible Social Media project launched by Issue One to address the negative mental, civic, and public health impacts of social media in the United States co-chaired by former House Democratic Caucus Leader Dick Gephardt and former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey.

Allen announced in December 2020 that she would explore a candidacy in the 2022 Massachusetts gubernatorial race.

She announced on February 15, 2022, that she had no path, and ended her campaign on "pure math."

Allen was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, U.S., but was raised in Claremont, California where her father taught at Harvey Mudd College.

She graduated from Claremont High School.

Her father, William B. Allen, is a political philosopher and former chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Her mother, Susan, was a research librarian.

She is married to James Doyle with two children.