Robert Gooding-Williams holds appointments at Columbia University in both the philosophy department and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), where he is a member of the core faculty and founding director of the Center for Race, Philosophy, and Social Justice. His areas of research and teaching interests include social and political philosophy (especially anti-racist critical theory), the history of African-American political thought, 19th century European philosophy (especially Nietzsche), existentialism, and aesthetics (including literature and philosophy, representations of race in film, and the literary theory and criticism of African-American literature).
Gooding-Williams is the author of Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford: 2001); Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge: 2005); and In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard: 2009).
In 2010, In the Shadow of Du Bois received two book commendations: Gooding-Williams was awarded "best book" by the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the American Political Science Assocation (APSA), and he was given an honorable mention citation in connection to the David Easton Award by the APSA's foundations of political theory section.
Over the course of his career, Gooding-Williams has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities' Independent Scholars and College Teachers Fellowship, two Andrew Mellon Faculty Fellowships, and a Laurance A. Rockefeller Fellowship from the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Presently, Gooding-Williams is a member of the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division Nominating Committee, an advisory editor of The Journal of the American Philosophical Association, a member of the Editorial Council of Constellations, and co-editor of the Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, a website that publishes commentary by philosophers and other scholars on recent philosophical writing on race and gender.