The American Academy of Sciences and Letters awarded Professor Danielle Allen with one of its 2025 Barry Prizes for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement. The prize, which is accompanied by a $50,000 cash award, was conferred by Academy President Donald W. Landry, interim president of the University of Florida, and Academy Board Chair Sanjeev R. Kulkarni of Princeton University in a ceremony at the historic Decatur House in Washington, DC.
The Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement is the Academy’s premier initiative to promote excellence in scholarship. This prestigious annual prize, open to scholars across diverse fields and disciplines, honors those whose work has made outstanding contributions to humanity’s understanding and cultivation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Recipients are nominated by the members of the Academy and appointed by the board of directors; upon receipt of the prize, they also become members of the Academy.
Danielle Allen’s prize citation for the 2025 Barry Prize reads:
Bringing together exceptional scholarship on the wisdom of past ages and keen insight into contemporary problems, Danielle Allen has illuminated the challenges of modern democratic life. Through careful engagement with the languages and texts of antiquity, she has cut through ideological oversimplifications in order to equip us to pursue justice and democracy in our own day. The Academy honors Dr. Allen’s distinguished contributions to both the theory and practice of democratic citizenship and political life.
Additionally, Professor Paul E. Peterson was inducted into AASL’s 2025 member class.
In becoming an Academy member he joins prestigious fellow members including Sir Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Haidt, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Steven Pinker, Sir Niall Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Akhil Reed Amar, and three Nobel-laureate scientists (chemist Arieh Warshel, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, and chemist Sir David W.C. MacMillan).
Read more about the 2025 Barry Prizes and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters here.