John E. Drabinski

John E. Drabinski (jdrab@umd.edu) is Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and English at University of Maryland.

He is the author of four books, most recently Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minnesota 2019) and Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh 2012). In addition to dozens of essays on Africana and European philosophy, he has edited a number of books and journal issues. He is currently finishing a book-length study of Baldwn’s non-fiction entitled ‘So Unimaginable a Price’: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic to be published by Northwestern University Press.

He has previous worked in the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College (Amherst, MA), where he was Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor, as well as the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College (Amherst, MA), Departments of Philosophy at Assumption College (Worcester, MA), Grand Valley State University (Allendale, MI), and the Department of Social Sciences at University of Houston (Houston, TX). Following the completion of his PhD at University of Memphis in 1996 under the direction of Robert Bernasconi, John held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL).

Born in Los Angeles, CA and raised in Boise, ID, he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Seattle University in 1991 with degrees in English and Philosophy.