Allison Stanger

Allison Stanger is Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor; Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University; Co-Director (with Danielle Allen), GETTING-Plurality Research Network, Harvard University; founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative (Vienna); and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Stanger’s next book, Who Elected Big Tech? is under contract with Yale University Press. 

Stanger’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wired. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Stanger is the co-editor (with Hannes Werthner et. al.) of Introduction to Digital Humanism: A Textbook (Springer, 2024), which is open access, and co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexiy Economics (SFI Press, 2020). 

Stanger has twice served as visiting professor of Government at Harvard University, where she spent academic year 2019-20 as technology and human values senior fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She was a co-author of the center’s April 2020 Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience and is a senior advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. Stanger was the 2020 Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress and 2020-21 SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

Stanger has testified (at the request of both Democrats and Republicans) before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. She was also a contributor to the Booz Allen Hamilton project on the World’s Most Enduring Institutions, the Woodrow Wilson School Task Force on the Changing Nature of Government Service, and the Princeton Project on National Security. Stanger has served as an advisor to Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff, US Department of State (2009-2011) and was on the writing team that produced the State Department’s December 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR).

Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. She also holds an AM in Regional Studies-Soviet Union (Harvard), a graduate diploma in Economics (London School of Economics), and a BS in Actuarial Science/Mathematics (Ball State University). She has studied foreign languages and literature at Charles University (Prague), the Sorbonne (Paris), and the Pushkin Institute (Moscow).

Her research has been funded by the International Relations and Exchanges Board, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the MacArthur Foundation. In addition to the appointments mentioned above, she has been a research fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (Harvard University), Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (Prague), the Human-Centered AI Institute (Stanford University), the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada (Moscow), New America (Washington, DC), the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (Harvard University).