Melissa Schwartzberg

Melissa Schwartzberg is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. Her primary research interests are in the historical origins and justifications of democracy, with a particular focus on ancient Greek institutions. Her books include Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007) and Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge, 2014), for which she won the 2016 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book published in liberal and/or democratic thought in 2014. She is currently completing a book on the justification of political bargaining (co-authored with Jack Knight), Bargaining over Democracy. Schwartzberg plans to use her Guggenheim Fellowship to finish a book examining how, since antiquity, ordinary citizens have provided local knowledge to rulers through voting and jury service. She is the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon “New Directions” Fellowship, and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. She previously taught at The George Washington University and Columbia University. She is the editor of NOMOS, the annual volume of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

For more information, please visit her website.

Photo Credit: Evan Mann