Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was educated at Harvard University and previously taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne and Rutgers University. His most recent book is Atrocity: A Literary History (Standford University Press, 2025). A collection of essays entitled Cosmopolitanisms, coedited with Paulo Horta (NYU Press), came out in 2017. His other books include Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford University Press, 2022), The Beneficiary (Duke University Press, 2017), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good (2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), and The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986). He is the director of a 2012 documentary entitled “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists,” available at bestfriendsfilm .com, and another short film about the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, “What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?,” which came out in 2020 and is available at mondoweiss.com.
Paulo Lemos Horta is Associate Professor of Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. A writer, translator, and literary historian, his writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has been president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code, and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Professor Appiah writes the “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine.