William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. His research and teaching focus on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy.
Egginton’s current book project, The Rigor of Angels, which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, will be published by Pantheon. He also has two further books in the works. For Bloomsbury’s Philosophical Filmmakers series, he is writing a book on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of cinematic expression in the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky; and, with David Castillo, he has written a sequel to Medialogies, Alt-Realities: Reading Cervantes and the Spanish Baroque in a Post-Truth Age, to be published by McGill-Queens UP in 2021. His most recent book, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and the Future of Community (Bloomsbury, 2018), takes stock of the current college and university campus debates over identity and inequality, and argues that that individual freedom has always only been possible in the context of the larger community.
Egginton is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books on such topics as the relationship between psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy; religion and politics; and science and literature. Widely recognized for his work on early modern culture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the baroque, he is the author of 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 (Columbia UP, 2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), and, with David Castillo, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the co-editor, with Mike Sandbothe, of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004) and, with David E. Johnson, of Thinking With Borges (2009), as well as the translator of Lisa Block de Behar’s Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003).