efore transferring to Harvard, Hannah W. Duane ’26 was a “cowboy.” Waking between four and five a.m. in a small United States Forest Service cabin in the heart of California’s White Mountains, she’d saddle up and ride with her fellow cowhands to herd cows along mountain pastures.

“We gather up all the cows and push them into the hills — drier, higher land to graze for the day,” she tells me. “It’s just incredibly beautiful up in the White Mountains. And we were working really hard.”

Hannah’s former life may be little-known to others navigating the traffic-lined streets of Cambridge. Her peers voted her the senior class’s “most mysterious,” though she’s not exactly sure why.

“I don’t know if I'm mysterious,” she says. If anything, she thinks she has “a resting skeptical face.”

Hannah’s mystique may stem from the fact that you’re less likely to have bumped into her on campus. For her final semester as an off-cycle senior, the former Currier House resident splits an apartment in Somerville with a friend. When we meet at a tavern just a couple blocks from her place, she stands in the distance, perched beneath an awning in a dark beige trench coat.

Born in San Francisco to journalist parents, Hannah grew up in a “bookish” house. Her mother, as a matter of fact, writes a lot of profiles just like this one. A lot of her childhood was spent rock climbing in Yosemite National Park with her dad. As we sit down, she poses herself as the quintessential “California jaded outdoorsman,” unsatisfied by the East Coast’s outdoor offerings. “What they call mountains here are like this tall,” she jokes while pointing to a tiny gap between her thumb and forefinger.

When the time came to apply to colleges, she landed on Deep Springs — a rural, two-year liberal arts school situated on a remote ranch in Eastern California. It enrolls between 12 and 15 students each year. “I was so fascinated by this place where you could go learn to be a cowboy, and also read Plato and Aristotle,” she says.

At Deep Springs College, Hannah’s education was “very humanities focused.” They emphasized community. There, she uncovered her interest in political theory and philosophy alongside the school’s ranch-caring rituals. A semester-long course could muse on the disjunctures within a single thinker, even a single book—an approach that Hannah views favorably when compared to the book-per-week mad dash in gateway theory courses like Social Studies 10.

“When I got here, I was just so frustrated that I would go into my professors’ offices and be like, ‘Why do you teach your class like this?’” she says.

“I’m definitely very opinionated,” she adds.

Arriving in Cambridge felt at first like being “a deer in headlights.” In the span of just a few days, she left her post in the White Mountains, crossing the country to the Quad to start Harvard as a sophomore transfer student. At first, she saw Harvard student’s obsession with extracurriculars as “ridiculous.” For a while, she did not involve herself with too many things.

Today, Hannah is anything but uninvolved. She wraps her fingers through the stem of her coffee mug with an air of professorial authority while talking about her thesis on theories of alienation and concepts of time in Hannah Arendt’s political theory — a return to her first independent study on the prolific legal political theorist while at Deep Springs. The Social Studies and Philosophy joint-concentrator resists the implicit separation of Harvard’s “extracurricular culture” from “academics,” instead pursuing opportunities to intermix them.

Her list of academic appointments is impressive: she’s a fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, a member of last year’s Science, Technology, & Society fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, and part of the advisory board for the Intellectual Vitality initiative. (While we’re at it, she is also a former Crimson magazine writer).

There’s more for this academic juggernaut. One of her most salient projects is her work in revitalizing the humanities. Duane played a key role in re-establishing the Arts and Humanities Division'’s Student Advisory Board alongside Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean D. Kelly.

The effort benefitted from persistence. “It emerged out of me emailing him and being like, ‘hello, I would really like to read “Being and Time,” and you are not teaching it anymore. Will you run a reading group for me?’” she says. Since then, the reading group has grown into a fully-fledged cohort of students.

This rich intellectual life goes beyond the classroom. For her birthday party this year, Hannah invited all her friends to her apartment to read Plato’s “The Symposium” aloud. At times, she worries these philosophies take up too much space.

“I wish I had more hobbies. I feel like the problem is that reading is my hobby, but then that sort of gets lumped into school,” she says.

And read she does, a whole lot. From Kierkegaard to Mary McCarthy, she reads far and wide. This year, she’s been reading a lot of W.H. Auden.

And perhaps that’s ultimately how we are to pursue a life intellectually enriched by the humanities, she says. Hannah recalls books with the ease of a card shuffler. She wields her memory so well that I begin to wonder how much she’ll remember me. When I ask her for a good poem, she suggests Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

She recites the last three stanzas off the top of her head, word for word.

—Magazine writer Christopher Schwarting can be reached at [email protected].