Peter Levine is the Associate Dean of Faculty and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life. He is a political philosopher and political scientist who specializes in civic life and has helped to develop Civic Studies as an international intellectual movement.

Levine graduated from Yale with a degree in philosophy. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Before coming to Tufts in 2008, he worked for Common Cause, the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and the National Commission for Civic Renewal and helped to found and then led CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), which is now part of Tisch College. He is a full professor in Tufts’ Political Science Department, directs the Civic Studies program, and holds secondary appointments in Philosophy, International Relations, Science and Technology Studies, and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).

In the domain of civic education, Levine was a co-organizer and co-author of The Civic Mission of Schools (2003), The College, Career & Civic Life Framework for State Social Studies Standards (2013) and The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap (2021). The first two are the sources of the “six promising practices” and the notion of “taking informed action” that are widely found in state and local policies and curricula. The last was released in 2021 and is receiving prominent attention.

Levine is the author of eight books, including most recently We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) and What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (Oxford University Press, 2022). A new philosophical book about skepticism and commitment is under contract.

Levine has held visiting appointments at Johns Hopkins (2020), Harvard (2022), Stanford (2025) and the University of Southern California (2026-7). He serves or previously served on the boards or steering committees of such civic organizations as the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, AmericaSpeaks, the American Bar Association’s Committee for Public Education, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, CivXNow, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, Discovering Justice, Everyday Democracy, Educating for American Democracy, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, and Street Law, inc.