Carlin Romano

Carlin Romano is a staff reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer (since 1984) and the Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education (since 2000). He teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously taught philosophy at Yale, Yeshiva University, Williams College, Bennington College, Temple University, and Saint Petersburg State University in Russia.

Life

Romano was born in Brooklyn. N.Y., and received his B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University. He took an M.Phil. in philosophy from Yale University and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he specialized in philosophy of law. He has won many awards, including First Prize in the John Dewey Memorial Essay Project, three "First Place" awards in Criticism from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts award for Criticism (2003). In 2006, he was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, cited by the Pulitzer Board for "bringing new vitality to the classic essay across a formidable array of topics."

In his academic and scholarly life, Romano is the author of the article on "Umberto Eco" in Oxford University Press's The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and his philosophical essays appear in a number of scholarly collections, such as Danto and His Critics. (Blackwell). Romano has been a Fulbright Scholar to both Russia and Germany, a McCloy Fellow to Germany, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard, a Gannett and NAJP Fellow at Columbia, and the first Eisenhower Fellow from the United States to Israel. He is an ongoing elected Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and will be a Milena Jesenska Fellow in 2009 at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.

Career

Romano wrote articles on philosophers such as Foucault, Habermas, Cassirer, Rorty, and Perelman in The Village Voice Literary Supplement beginning in 1981. Romano's writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, Times Literary Supplement, International Herald Tribune, Tikkun, The Weekly Standard, Book Forum, Salon, Slate, Lingua Franca, Columbia Journalism Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Die Welt. He served as President of The National Book Critics Circle, the U.S. organization of more than 900 book critics, reviewers, editors and scholars, in the mid-1990s.

Romano has been involved in many literary, intellectual and philosophical controversies over the years. He wrote Philadelphia Inquirer articles in the 1980s about a major dispute between Janet Malcolm and Jeffrey Kittay. He wrote articles in The Nation about author Dan Moldea's legal actions against The New York Times, and in the The Chronicle of Higher Education on writer Dale Peck about the latter's book-reviewing.

Romano's most famous controversy was his November, 1993 review, in The Nation, of Catharine MacKinnon's Only Words. It involved a rape hypothetical and criticized MacKinnon's positions on artistic representation and freedom of expression.

External links

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