Neil Roberts

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Political Studies

Biography:

Professor Roberts’s areas of expertise include modern and contemporary political theory, theories of freedom, African American and Caribbean thought, critical race theory, and politics in literature. He is chair and professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, where he is also a faculty affiliate in political science and religion. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors and serves on the Executive Editorial Board of Political Theory. Publications include the award-winning Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the collaborative work Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), and the forthcoming How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. Professor Roberts is also the author of published and forthcoming articles, reviews, and book chapters in The Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought, Caribbean Studies, Clamor magazine, The CLR James Journal, Daily Nous, Encyclopedia of Political Theory, Journal of Haitian Studies, Karib, New Political Science, Patterns of Prejudice, Perspectives on Politics, Philosophia Africana, Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques, Political Theory, Sartre Studies International, Shibboleths, Small Axe, and an anthology devoted to the thought of Sylvia Wynter. Additionally, he is coeditor of the CAS Working Papers in Africana Studies Series (with Ben Vinson) and the collection of essays Creolizing Rousseau (with Jane Anna Gordon), and he was the guest editor of a Theory & Event symposium on the Trayvon Martin case.

BA, Brown University; MA, PhD, University of Chicago. At Bard: 2020–21.