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Kwame Anthony Appiah

Scholar and ethicist

Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Address

Thursday, January 8, 2026, 6 p.m.
McCrary Theatre, Center for the Arts

Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges audiences to look beyond the boundaries that divide them and to celebrate common humanity. Named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 public intellectuals, one of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Great Immigrants” and awarded a National Humanities Medal by the White House, Appiah considers readers’ ethical quandaries in a weekly column as “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine.

A recipient of the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress, Appiah currently teaches at New York University. His book “Cosmopolitanism,” recipient of the Arthur Ross Book Award, is a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering.

In “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,” Appiah lays out how honor propelled moral revolutions in the past — and could do so in the future. Among his most recent books are “As If: Idealization and Ideals,” “Mistaken Identities” and “The Lies That Bind.”

From 2009 to 2012, Appiah served as president of the PEN American Center, the world’s oldest human rights organization, and in 2015 he was named to the Top Global Thought Leaders Index.

Appiah was born in London to a Black father and a white mother, raised in Ghana and educated at Cambridge University, where he received a doctorate in philosophy. His book “In My Father’s House” and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. are major works of African struggles for self-determination.