Robert Gooding-Williams joins the Philosophy Department as Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy. Over the course of his career, he has taught at Simmons College, Amherst College, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. 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). His Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois, will be published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2025. Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and in 2020 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2023, the Yale GSAS Alumni Association awarded him the Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor that GSAS bestows on alumni. Gooding-Williams received both his BA (1975) and his PhD (1982) from Yale. He is also the organizer of Philosophy Department’s Spring, 2025 Political Philosophy and Race Speaker Series. For more information regarding the speaker series, see the Philosophy Department calendar.
