Bill E. Lawson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His areas of academic specialization are African American philosophy and social and political philosophy. Apart from numerous scholarly articles, his published works include the edited The Underclass Question (Temple UP, 1992); Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (Indiana UP, 1993), co-authored with Howard McGary; Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1999), co-edited with Frank M. Kirkland; Faces of Environmental Racism, 2nded. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), co-edited with Laura Westra; Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (Indiana UP, 2004), co-edited with Donald F. Koch; the edited 2009 annual supplement of the proceedings of the University of Memphis Spindel Conference, “Race, Racism, and Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XLVII; and Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 (Liverpool UP, 2018), co-edited with Celeste-Marie Bernier, Liverpool Studies in International Slavery. Lawson has testified before a United States Congressional Subcommittee on the issue of welfare reform. He was a 2011-12 University of Liverpool–Fulbright Fellow at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. Lawson is a Vietnam veteran.
