A History of the Concept of Race
William Edelglass traces the intellectual history of the concept of race in the West, from its prehistory to today.
William Edelglass is Director of Studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emerson College (on leave through August 2026).
His writing and teaching engage Buddhist studies, environmental humanities, and philosophy. William’s recent publications have addressed mindfulness and ethics; meditation and well-being; the ethics of difference and climate change; B. R. Ambedkar’s Buddhist political thought; non-violence and justice; the role of faith in Indian Buddhist literature on the path; apophatic language and Buddhist practice; etc. Some of his work, on philosophy of science, has appeared in Tibetan.
William’s most recent book, The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, co-edited with Sara McClintock and Pierre-Julien Harter, was published in August 2022. He is also co-editor of Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings (Oxford, 2009; with Jay Garfield); The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (Oxford, 2011; also with Jay Garfield); and Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought (Duquesne, 2012; with James Hatley and Christian Diehm). William is also co-editor of the journal Environmental Philosophy and Chair of the Board of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy. William studied and also taught Buddhist philosophy in Dharamsala, India, and taught Western philosophy to Tibetan monks at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics. He is the principle scholar of the Brattleboro Words Trail, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to build community through collaborative humanities work by supporting people to connect more deeply with the places they share.
Contact Information
- Phone: (802) 579-8601
