(To view the lecture, click on THIS LINK.)

    Danielle S. Allen delivered this lecture at Wagner College on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008. The lecture was entitled “Stranger, Neighbor, Citizen, Friend: What is Citizenship in the 21st Century?”
    Allen was introduced by Stevie Lacy-Pendleton, deputy editorial page editor and senior news columnist for the Staten Island Advance.
    Danielle Allen is, by anyone’s measure, an extraordinary scholar and social commentator. After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, she earned master’s and doctoral degrees in classical studies from Cambridge before joining the classics faculty at the University of Chicago and simultaneously embarking on a new academic course in political studies at Harvard, from which she also earned master’s and doctoral degrees.
    After serving for 3 years as dean of Chicago’s Division of Humanities, Allen became the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where, according to Washington Post writer Matthew Mosk, she “studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn.” Allen helped uncover the hoax of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s supposed devotion to Islam.
    In 2000, Allen won a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant,” worth half a million dollars. After learning that she had won the award, the 29-year-old associate classics professor said that she had three things she would do with the grant:
1) support her writing projects,
2) further her research on improving elementary and secondary education in underprivileged neighborhoods, and
3) buy a dog.
    In 2006, Allen was elected to a 9-year term on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
    Allen’s first book, “The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens,” was published in 2000 and reprinted in 2002 by Princeton. The book explored the challenges posed by punishment to democratic Athenian politics and society.
    Her next book, “Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education,” was published in 2004 by the University of Chicago; a paperback edition was issued in 2006. The book “combines brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago,” according to the Columbia News, a Columbia University publication that announced Allen’s election to the Pulitzer board. “By doing so, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship that she hopes can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us.”
    Allen’s forthcoming book, “Philosophy in Politics: The Athenian Case Study,” is currently under way and is scheduled for publication by Wiley-Blackwell.
    To read an interview with Allen about “Talking to Strangers,” go to THIS LINK.
    Allen’s 2004 essay, “A Lackluster Golden Anniversary,” commenting on the 50th anniversary of the famous Brown v. Board of Education “separate but equal” decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, can be read online at THIS LINK.
    Funding for Allen’s Wagner College lecture was provided by the Academic and Cultural Enrichment Program, Project Pericles, and the Office of the President.