Prospective Students

Professor Carlin Romano

Check out his Fake News and Post-Truth lecture event happening Oct. 11, 2017.

Carlin Romano, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Ursinus College, also teaches courses in media theory and philosophical problems of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Formerly the longtime Book Editor and then Book Critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer (1984-2009), he also began to write in 2000 as the Critic-at-Large of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the international newspaper of academe based in Washington D.C. Romano has since published nearly 200 essays, articles and reviews in the Chronicle during that 17-year tenure, and is the Chronicle's only Pulitzer Prize Finalist in its 50-year history, cited by the Pulitzer Prize Board for "bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics." Romano's reportage and criticism have also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Village Voice, the American Scholar, Harper's, Slate, Salon and many other national publications over the years.

As a philosopher and academic, Romano is best-known for America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage), a 672-page critical study of philosophy in American life that won him a Guggenheim. The New York Times Book Review, in its first front-page review of a philosophy book since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, described it as "ambitious" and "convincing," as well as "an encyclopedic survey of the life of the mind in the United States." NPR Books described it as "dauntingly brilliant" and the Los Angeles Review of Books called it "massive, impressive and indispensable...perhaps the best history of American philosophy of the last half-century." Romano has taught at many universities and colleges over the years, including Princeton, Yale, Williams and St. Petersburg State University in Russia, where he was a Fulbright Professor.

Having lectured widely in Asia and served as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, Romano is now working on a book about Asian philosophy and its real-world force in an age of globalization. Just before coming to USF, where he will teach a seminar in the philosophy of journalism as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Honors College, Romano was invited to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, exploring how journalism as a field might adapt and adopt the pro bono practices of the legal profession. Romano holds degrees in philosophy from Princeton and Yale, as well as a law degree from Columbia.