BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University will welcome acclaimed scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah as the speaker for the 2011 President’s Convocation to be held on Aug. 31 at 7 p.m. in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall (1210 N. Park St., Bloomington). The first campus-wide event of the new semester, the convocation is free and open to the public.
Named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010, Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has published widely on the topics of ethics, African and black cultural studies, racial identity, political theory and philosophy of the mind. He is currently the president of PEN American Center, the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization.
The author of celebrated books, Appiah’s works include In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1993), which won the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Herskovitz Award of the African Studies Association; Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton University Press, 1997); Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2007), which was featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine; and Experiments in Ethics (Harvard University Press, 2010). His newest book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.) is due to be published this fall. Appiah has edited nearly two dozen books and contributed works to publications such as the Journal of Social Philosophy, the New York Review of Books and Global Agenda.