Logo

<< Back

Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah (Clare 1972), born 8 May 1954, is a scholar of moral and political philosophy, African and African-American studies, and issues of personal and political identity, multiculturalism and nationalism.

After Cambridge, he taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities before moving to Princeton University in 2002 as Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values. His current interests range over African and African-American intellectual history and literary studies, and the ethics and philosophy of mind and language.

He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Ethics of Identity, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, In My Father’s House, and the Dictionary of Global Culture (co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.). His first novel, Avenging Angel, was largely set at Clare College, Cambridge.

He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was inducted in 2008 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Chair of the Executive Board of the American Philosophical Association, Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and President of the PEN American Center, the 3,400-member association of literary writers, editors and translators.