Prof. Carlin Romano teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “Massive, impressive and indispensable…perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the past half-century”, and by National Public Radio as “dauntingly brilliant”.  He is also the editor and contributor to Philadelphia Noir, a collection of original short stories in the highly praised Akashic Noir series.

As a journalist, literary critic, and public intellectual, Prof. Romano has held many prominent positions, including being the president of the National Book Critics Circle, literary editor and literary critic for 25 years for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and critic-at-large for several reputed publications.  His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, and the Village Voice.  Prof. Romano has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Peking University’s Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, the First Foreign Philosophy Visiting Fellow at Fudan University, a Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism, who was cited by the Pulitzer Board for “bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics”.

As a philosopher, Prof. Romano has taught at prestigious institutions like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg State University.  He is the author of the main article, “East Asian Philosophy of Religion”, in the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and of an article on Umberto Eco in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.      

As a pragmatism scholar, Prof. Romano is writing a book entitled Over There: The Internationalization of American Philosophy.  Through the Fulbright-Nehru project, the book is extending its territory to India.  Prof. Romano is also studying how Bhimrao Ambedkar, John Dewey’s most influential Indian student, shaped Indian law and politics.  Besides, he is probing and analyzing modern Indian philosophy, cinema, literature, TV, and journalism to identify pragmatist elements and resonances.