Presidential Scholars Program

Andre C. Willis is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He is a philosopher of religion whose work focuses on Enlightenment reflections on religion, African American religious thought, critical theory, and democratic citizenship as it relates to ‘religious’ notions of hope, recognition, and belonging. Willis earned a B.A. at Yale in philosophy and his M.A. and Ph. D. at Harvard in the Committee on the Study of Religion. He is the author of Towards a Humean True Religion (2015) and is currently working on a manuscript about African American religion and politics tentatively titled "Afro-theisms and Post-democracy". He has published articles in international journals such as Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Political Theology, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Radical America. At Brown he serves as the Director of the Program on Race and Resilience and Co-Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Oversight Board