Faculty

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. In recent years he has been focusing on race. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and four books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell University, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America. It has been adopted widely in courses across the United States (more than 100 campuses so far), not just in philosophy, but also political science, sociology, anthropology, African-American, and race relations. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. His most recent book, Contract and Domination (Polity Press, 2007), is co-authored with Carole Pateman, who wrote The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), and it seeks to bring the two “contracts” together. He is currently working on a collection of his Caribbean essays, Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class, and Social Domination . Before joining Northwestern, Charles Mills taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.


Writings and Recently Taught Courses

Books

• The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
• From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
• Contract and Domination (with Carole Pateman), Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007.

Edited Works

• Philosophy: the Big Questions. Ed. Mills, Ruth Sample, and James P. Sterba. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

• "'Ideal Theory' as Ideology," in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy , Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 165-84, in a symposium: "Women Philosophers, Sidelined Challenges, and Professional Philosophy."
• "Kant's Untermenschen ," in Andrew Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 169-93.
• "White Ignorance," in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance , Philosophy and Race Series (SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 13-38.
• "Multiculturalism as/and/or Anti-Racism?" in Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 89-114.
• "Stuart Hall's Changing Representations of 'Race,'" forthcoming in Brian Meeks, ed., Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall (Ian Randle Publishers/Lawrence & Wishart).
• "The Domination Contract," forthcoming in Iris Marion Young, Molly Shanley, and Dan O'Neill, eds., The Illusion of Consent: Essays after Carole Pateman , a festschrift for Carole Pateman ( Penn State University Press).

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Current CV

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