William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He was recently Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. He has been professor of philosophy at University of Macao, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at University of Salzburg, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow in Berlin. In 2021, he became Professor Honoris Causa of the Agora Hermeneutica. His books have been published by the university presses of Cambridge, Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, Notre Dame, SUNY and others. His apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science and media studies in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). His most recent book, Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation (2025), plies his apophatic philosophy to illuminate issues of urgent public purport. He lectures and leads seminars on his ideas in English, French, German, and Italian on four continents.
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