William Paris

(he/him)

• BA, Susquehanna University
• MA, New York University
• PhD, Pennsylvania State University

William Paris is an assistant professor in the department. He is also an associate editor for the journal Critical Philosophy of Race and one of the co-hosts of the podcast What’s Left of Philosophy? His research focuses on history of African American philosophy, critical theory, 20th-century continental philosophy, and political philosophy.  He has published on Frantz Fanon and gender, Sylvia Wynter’s phenomenology of imagination, and C. L. R. James and Hannah Arendt. He has also published articles on subjects concerning critical theory and utopian consciousness, as well as a defense of the explanatory work of critical theory vis-à-vis race in Puncta and Critical Philosophy of Race. He has an article forthcoming on self-emancipation in the New German Critique. He is also the author of Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this text, he brings together the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst to generate a novel critical theory of racial domination under capitalism as essentially the domination of time. Critical theory, thus, is tasked with reconstructing the real utopian tendencies in historical processes that can negate the domination of time.