Alan James Ryan, FBA (born 9 May 1940) was Warden of New College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and currently a lecturer at Princeton University.
He was educated at Christ's Hospital, Balliol College, Oxford, and University College, London. Elected a fellow of New College in 1969, he returned in 1996 to take up the Wardenship. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986.
Ryan is a recognised authority on the work of John Stuart Mill, having contributed directly to the ‘Reversionary’ school, which led to a re-examination of Mill’s work from the 1970s. His academic work also takes in broader themes in political theory, including the philosophy of social science, the nature of property, and liberalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ryan has held positions at the Universities of Oxford, Essex, Keele, Princeton University, as well as the University of Virginia School of Law. He was also a Visiting Professor of Political Science at The New School.
Ryan is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. Ryan can be heard here giving a brief account of Mill's philosophy, and a defence of him as the greatest British philosopher, on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time.
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