in 1993. and a National Arts Journalism Program Fellow at Columbia University in 1998. In 1989 Romano received an Eisenhower Fellowship; in his case to travel to Israel. He is an ongoing elected Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. Controversial critiques Martin Heidegger In the October 18, 2009 issue of The Chronicle in "Heil Heidegger!", citing Heidegger's well-known past Nazi affiliations, Romano was highly critical of Martin Heidegger's work and its continued acceptance amongst American academics and intellectuals. The article was a review of the publication in English of French philosopher Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (first published in 2005, in France), highly critical of Heidegger for the same reason. Romano called on librarians to stop stocking the collected works of the German philosopher, which appear under the term Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. This controversial article renewed public dialogue about the relation between a person's politics and the merit of their work. Catharine MacKinnon The publication of "the most controversial by far" Only Words book review, written by Romano, provoked a strong reaction with his imagined description of himself raping the author, Catharine MacKinnon. This performative counterexample to MacKinnon's apparent contention that a rape in words is equivalent to a rape in deeds intensified the debate about legal sanctions against pornography. The philosopher Nancy Bauer in How to Do Things With Pornography described it as "a shockingly clueless and callous review." David Gates wrote, "Free-speech stalwart Nat Hentoff jumped in—on MacKinnon's side, claiming Romano 'set out to debase [her] person, along with her ideas.'" Romano said in defense of this review, "The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested by a good example." Philip Roth In a 2007 book review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, Romano revived the long-standing controversy over the extent that Roth's fiction is autobiographical. He used Claire Bloom's 1996 memoir Leaving a Doll's House as proof that Roth's books are "more autobiographical than imaginative." Richard Rorty In a 2007 elegy of Richard Rorty, Romano's characterization of his subject's originality and creativity drew an extended refutation from the philosopher Brian Leiter. Books He wrote America the Philosophical, a book with the main claim that the current United States has the "most philosophical culture in the history of the world." References External links Living people