David Livingstone Smith

About Me

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I am professor of philosophy at the University of New England, in Maine. 

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For the past two decades, my work has focussed on dehumanization, particularly in relation to race and genocide. I have written three books on this subject. The first is Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others (St. Martin's Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for nonfiction. The second, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The third Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, won the Joseph B. Gittler Award for philosophy of the social sciences and was shortlisted for the Nayaf Al-Rodhan prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021.

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I speak widely at both academic and non-academic settings, and my work has been featured extensively in the national and international media. I have been featured in several  television documentaries, and I am often interviewed for newspapers, magazines, podcasts, and radio. In 2012, in was a guest at the G20 economic summit, where I spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.