Skip to main content
Nannerl O. Keohane

Nannerl O. Keohane, Ph.D.

Nannerl O. Keohane is a political philosopher and university administrator who has taught at Swarthmore College, Stanford University, Wellesley College, Duke University and Princeton University. She is currently a faculty affiliate of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. Dr. Keohane also served as president of Duke University from 1993 to 2004 and of Wellesley College from 1981 to 1993, and she has been a school visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Dr. Keohane has published “Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment” (1980), “Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University” (2006) and “Thinking About Leadership” (2010). She also co-edited “Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology” (1982) and “Women and Equality,” a 2020 special issue of the academic journal Daedalus. She is currently writing a book titled “Virginia Woolf and Modern Feminism.”

In addition to serving on the board of the Doris Duke Foundation, Dr. Keohane chairs the Visiting Committee for Harvard College. Prior to that, she served on the Harvard Corporation, and the boards of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IBM, Colonial Williamsburg and the Brookings Institution, in addition to holding office in the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Keohane received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, a dual Bachelor and Master of Arts degree as a Marshall Scholar from St. Anne’s College of Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.