Daniela Cammack

I grew up in Manchester, in the north-west of England, and went to my local high school, leaving in 1998 with A Levels in Modern History, English Literature, Mathematics, Russian, and General Studies. In 2002, I graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, with a double First in Modern History and English, also ranking first in my subject. After training as an English teacher, I spent a semester teaching in Nanjing, China. Then, in the autumn of 2003, I went to Harvard on a von Clemm fellowship, which is awarded to one graduating student from Oxford annually to fund a year of study at Harvard in any discipline.

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At Harvard, I began to work on the history of political thought under Richard Tuck, and the following year I did the M.Phil. in Intellectual History and Political Thought at King's College, Cambridge. I focused on 19th and 20th century political thought and wrote my Master’s dissertation on Marx's and Hayek's views of capitalism and freedom. While there, I held a prize studentship from the Centre for History and Economics, one of whose directors, Gareth Stedman Jones, was also my supervisor.

 

In the autumn of 2006, I returned to Harvard to begin a PhD in political theory, again working with Richard Tuck, and in 2008 I defended a dissertation prospectus on early modern constitutionalism, focusing on the political thought of the English, American and French revolutions. In the same year I worked as a teaching fellow for Richard Tuck (in ancient and medieval political thought) and Jane Mansbridge (in democratic theory).

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From 2009/10 to 2014/15 I held a series of research fellowships: in 2009/10 at the Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics at Harvard, in 2010/11 at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, from 2011 to 2013 at Yale Law School, and from 2013 to 2015 at the Harvard Society of Fellows. I used these years to reset my intellectual direction. What had previously been a side interest in ancient Greek politics and political thought became a full-time pursuit. The first fruit of this shift was my dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, which won Harvard's Robert Noxon Toppon prize for the best dissertation in political science in 2013.

 

In the years that followed, I turned each chapter of my dissertation into an article (in one case, two), and published a further seven long research articles on Greek themes, as well as one on Rousseau and several other essays and reviews. Each article in the Greek series sought to undermine a single pillar of the prevailing interpretation of demokratia. I judged this work to be a necessary precursor to the book on ancient Greek (especially Athenian) democracy that I wanted eventually to write.

 

In 2017, I joined Yale as an assistant professor, and in 2019, I moved to UC Berkeley with my husband and two-year-old daughter. During the pandemic, I signed contracts for two books on democracy with Princeton University Press: one on classical Greek demokratia and the other assessing later democratic ideas and practices from the ancient Greek perspective (as I interpret it). Writing the first book was my main occupation, alongside teaching and family life, between 2022 and 2025. It will come out in the winter of 2026/27. Since completing it, I've been working on new papers on Aristotle, Hobbes, and the Roman tribunate, and have also started writing my second book, provisionally entitled Democracy: How the People Lost Power.