Peter Lange

peter.lange@duke.edu
(919) 684-2631

Provost

Peter Lange joined the Department of Political Science at Duke University in 1981 after a previous teaching position at Harvard University. Since arriving at Duke, he has been an Associate (1982-1989), a Full Professor (since 1989), and Chair of the Department of Political Science (1996 to 1999). He assumed his position as the Provost of Duke University in July of 1999.

Earlier, he served as the Special Assistant to the Provost for International Affairs (1993-1994) and as the Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs (1994-1996). Lange also chaired the committee that produced the proposal for Curriculum 2000, the substantially revised curriculum for Duke Arts and Sciences undergraduates, which was implemented in the Fall of 2000.

Lange earned his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. Lange has earned numerous fellowships including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1967 and the Fulbright Research Scholar (Milan, Italy) in 1986.

As a professor, Lange focuses on the topics of comparative politics and political economy. His early work focused on Italian politics and the Italian Communist Party. He subsequently studied European trade union movements. In more recent years his research focus has turned to the economic performance of the advanced industrial democracies and the effects of globalization on these relationships.

His current research is a collaborative project on the effects of globalization on perceptions of economic risk on the part of citizens in democratic settings and the ways such perceptions become translated into national policies to secure citizens against such risks.

Lange has also trained numerous doctoral students, several of whom have won national awards for their dissertations and have gone on to distinguished academic careers.