Robert Gooding-Williams

Robert Gooding-Williams joins the FAS as Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy. Over the course of his career, Gooding-Williams has taught at Simmons College, Amherst College, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He 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). Gooding-Williams’s 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 Gooding-Williams 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 University.