Johns Hopkins UniversityEST. 1876

America’s First Research University
William Egginton

William Egginton

Department Chair, Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish & Portuguese, Head of Section, Decker Professor in the Humanities

Contact Information

Research Interests: Spanish and Latin American literatures, comparative European literature and thought

Education: PhD, Stanford University

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > William Egginton

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and former director and founder of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of literature and philosophy whose work ranges from early modern Europe to contemporary Latin America, he is the author of twelve books, most recently Alejandro Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2024), which examines the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. His books, which explore such topics as psychoanalysis, the Baroque, and the philosophy of physics, include How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is also the co-author, with David Castillo, of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022).

 

Egginton’s contributions to early modern scholarship have focused on the importance for cultural and intellectual history of the rise of the great theatrical institutions in Europe, most notably in Spain. His theory of theatricality posits the stage as a fundamental medium for the transmission of ideas that contributed to structuring a way of conceiving of and inhabiting space peculiar to early modernity. Theatricality theory paved the way for his later work on baroque and neobaroque culture, which spanned cultural production in the Americas as well as in Europe.

In recent years he has increasingly written for a broader public in venues such as The New York Times, and in books for the general public. In this way, the form as well as the content of his work have developed into a full-throated appeal for the essential role of the humanities—particularly literature and literary studies—in society today.

Professor Egginton teaches courses on a range of topics, including Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. His recent courses include:

  • Poets, Physicists, Philosophers, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
  • Great Books at Hopkins
  • The Cosmic Imagination
  • Baroque Literature and Thought
  • Horror in Spanish Literature
  • The Invention of Fiction
  • Borges, Derrida, Heidegger and the Paradoxes of Perception
  • Don Quixote
  • The Literature of Existence

Selected Books

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2024)
  • The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Pantheon, 2023)
  • The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and the Future of Community (Bloomsbury, 2018)
  • The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)
  • In Defense of Religious Moderation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)
  • The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

Selected Edited and Translated Books

  • Guest editor, with Yi-Ping Ong, The New Politics of Existence, MLN 137.5 (2023).
  • Lisa Block de Behar, Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation, second edition and translation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014).
  • Co-editor with David E. Johnson, Thinking With Borges (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 2009)

Selected Articles and Chapters

  • “Kant, Existentialism, and the Anthropic Principle,” MLN 137.5 (2023): 917-930.
  • “The Psychosis of Power: A Lacanian reading of Roa Bastos’s I, The Supreme,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5.2 (2021): 4-11.
  • “Cervantes’s Black Mirror,” Cervantes 40.2 (2020): 175–190.
  • “Hispanism and Humanitas in the Market University.” Co-authored with David Castillo. Hispanic Issues Online 6 (2016).
  • “Affective Disorder.” diacritics 40.2 (2012): 24-43.
  • “Religion – Conspiracy – Code.” MLN 126.4 (2011): 32-43.
  • “On Radical Atheism, Chronolibidinal Reading, and Impossible Desires.” CR: The New Centennial Review 9.1 (2009): 191-209.
  • “The Baroque as a Problem of Thought.” PMLA 124.1 (2009): 143-49.
  • “Performance and Presence, Analysis of a Modern Aporia.” Journal of Literary Theory 1.1 (2007): 3-18
  • “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque.” SAQ 106.1 (2007): 107-128.
     
 

In addition to his scholarly work, Egginton also frequently writes for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. His recent articles include:

He has also done numerous podcast interviews and events on his recent book, The Rigor of Angels, including: