Brief Bio

George Yancy, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Darhmouth College, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, critical phenomenology (especially, on racial embodiment), and philosophy of the Black experience. Yancy received his BA (Cum Laude) in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, where he wrote his undergraduate philosophy honors thesis under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars. He received his first MA in philosophy from Yale University and his second MA from New York University in Africana Studies. He received his PhD in philosophy from Duquesne University (with distinction). Yancy is particularly interested in the formation of African-American philosophical thought as articulated within the social and historical space of anti-Black racism, African-American agency, and questions of Black identity formation.

Yancy's current work focuses on the theme of whiteness and how it constitutes a site of embedded social reality and a site of deep and enduring opacity, which is related to what he has theorized as white ambush. He is concerned with the ways in which whiteness as an embodied phenomenon is a reality underwritten by historical forces and practices. Hence, he takes history seriously as an ever-present force through which white bodies are positioned. He is interested in themes such as white subject formation, white epistemic ways of knowing/not knowing, privilege and hegemony, and forms of white spatial bonding as sites of white solidarity and interpellation (or hailing). He is also interested in how such forms of white epistemic and bodily bonding are underwritten by white intelligibility. Yancy explores the theme of racial embodiment, particularly in terms of how white bodies live their whiteness unreflectively in relationship to the deformation of the black body and other bodies of color. He sees the two as profoundly relational. He has recently theorized what he calls an ontology of no edges and an ethics of no edges as a way of rethinking how we think about racism. Within this context, his work explores Black Erlebnis or the lived experience of black people, which raises important questions regarding Black subjectivity, modes of Black spatial mobility, ontological truncation, and embodied resistance. If white bodies are always already haptic or touching Black bodies, then we need to rethink the very concept of white innocence and to rethink how we gesture toward a place called "arrival" vis-à-vis anti-racist practices on the part of white people. He has theorized critical processes of what he terms embodied suturing and un-suturing and how both concepts are linked to questions of white embodiment and white spatiality. Related to his concept of un-suturing is how he understands white vulnerability or white wounding or white crisis. His work on racial embodiment falls within the importantly rich concerns that occupy Critical Phenomenology.

Yancy is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and biography. More specifically, he is interested in questions regarding philosophical self-formation, that is, how philosophers come to believe what they believe and how such belief formations/configurations are linked to historical, cultural, racial, and gendered processes. Yancy is also interested in ways to engage philosophy dynamically, to practice frank speech or courageous speech (parrhesia), within and outside the classroom. He has been very successful at, and known very successfully for, engaging public spaces outside of the academy through his numerous and engaging essays and interviews at The New York Times' Philosophy Column, "The Stone." Yancy's publications are varied and extensive. He has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books, articles, and chapters. His work is both nationally and internationally influential and has been very well-received by scholars from around the world, including in Canada, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and France. Yancy believes that philosophy is a way of life that he must practice because he exists. He thinks of philosophy not simply as a conceptual exercise or an academic project, but as a profound site that is expressive of deep existential and social suffering. Yancy is also Philosophy of Race Book Series editor at Lexington Books.