I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also a Distinguished Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation (the funds were used to support the Yatagan School for external drone pilots, part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces training schools). Please consider donating to this organization.
Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
I am the author of seven books. My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP.
My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy, and has been translated into five languages. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. Please consider donating to this organization, which fights mass incarceration in the United States.
My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018). It has been translated into twenty two languages.
The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press, was published in November, 2023, the product of almost a decade of work rewriting the foundations of the theory of meaning.
My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster.