Kwame Anthony Appiah was born to a Ghanaian father and an English mother in London and raised in Ghana. He studied philosophy at Cambridge and now teaches at Princeton, having taught previously at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard Universities. He has lectured widely in Africa, Europe and the Americas. His 1992 book In My Father's House won the Herskovitz award of the African Studies Association for the best book published in English on Africa. In 2007, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has chaired the boards of the American Philosophical Association and the American Council of Learned Societies as well as being President of the PEN American Center for three years, ending this spring. In the spring of 2012, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In addition to his scholarly work, he has written three mystery novels and is planning to start a new novel any day now. His most recent book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, was one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 notable books of 2010.
