Frank M. Kirkland

Frank M. Kirkland is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, both of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the co-editor, with D.P. Chattopadhaya, of Phenomenology: East and West: Essays in Honor of J.N. Mohanty (Springer, 1993) and the co-editor, with Bill E. Lawson, of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1999). Besides writing a small monograph on Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line: Normative or Empirical, Evolving or Non-Evolving (George Mason UP, 2005), Kirkland has published articles on Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, as well as on Douglass, Du Bois, Hegel and the Haitian Revolution, and the theme of modernity and intellectual life in the African diaspora. He is currently working on three essays: “Inequality: Kantian Thoughts and Hegelian Resolutions on Contractually Liberal and Contractually Racial Dispositions,” “Africa, ‘We the Underdeveloped’: Wynter’s Discontent in the light of Hegel’s Conception of Development,” and “Racecraft or the ‘Science’ of Race and Observational Reason in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” The last is part of a book manuscript at which he has been long at work, titled Hegel’s Idealism and the Black Atlantic Tradition. Two recent essays, “Kant on Race and Transition” and “Hegel on Race and Development,” are both included in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race (Routledge, 2018), co-edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson. His essay “Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism” is forthcoming this year in Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner’s co-edited volume, African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press).