Robert Gooding-Williams

Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His areas of research and teaching interest include Social and Political Philosophy, the History of African-American Political Thought, 19th Century European Philosophy, Existentialism, and Aesthetics. Gooding-Williams is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001), Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2005), and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard 2009).  In 2010, In the Shadow of Du Bois won two book prizes: one, for the best book on race, ethnicity and political thought awarded by the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association; and the second, an honorable mention citation by the David Easton Award, awarded by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Photo Credit: Sara Gooding-Williams