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 Oxford (Wadham College) 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 (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 Cambridge (King's College). 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. In part, I was keen to return because all my undergraduate and Master’s training had been on modern material, and I wanted to read ancient authors such as Plato and Aristotle and study ancient Greek and Latin. I was particularly fortunate to be readmitted because it meant I could move in with my husband, David Singh Grewal—another political theory graduate student at Harvard—whom I'd married in 2005. 

 

In 2008 I defended a dissertation prospectus on early modern constitutionalism, focusing on the political thought of the English, American and French revolutions, before a committee consisting of Richard Tuck, Emma Rothschild, Jennifer Hochschild and Eric Nelson. In the same year I became a member of the Center for European Studies at Harvard and 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. While I missed teaching, those years were fantastic for reading. During the 2009/10 academic year I had decided to abandon my dissertation on early modern constitutionalism and work full time on what had up to then been a side interest: the role of the courts in classical Athenian democracy. With the support of my advisors, I made a systematic study of most of the extant primary sources from the ancient Greek world and found the material fascinating. But the more I read, the more I doubted fundamental aspects of the modern interpretation of demokratia, and the further I wanted to dig into both the historiography and the theorizations of democracy both ancient and modern that built on it. 

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The first fruit of this research was my dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, which won Harvard's Robert Noxon Toppon prize for the best dissertation in political science in 2013. Since then, alongside three happy years teaching at Yale, having a wonderful daughter (born 2017), and moving to Berkeley in 2019, I’ve published twelve articles challenging important strands of the existing scholarship on ancient Greek political thought and practice, one article on Rousseau, and several shorter essays and reviews. In March 2020 I signed a contract with Princeton University Press for my first book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, and after working on it steadily since the pandemic, I'm very happy to say that it should be out early in 2026.