Nahum D. Chandler is an intellectual and scholar working broadly in philosophical problematics, especially as they concern the history of the human sciences, as well as the concepts of historicity and historical memory in general. After completing his undergraduate study at the University of California at Davis, he received his Ph.D. in social and cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago, spending one summer at Jesus College and the Rhodes House at Oxford University. As a post-doctoral scholar, for the 1998-1999 academic year, he was a residential member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) and the Ford Foundation.

During the 2005-2006 academic year he held a Fulbright lectureship at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, teaching in three different faculties -- Arts and Letters, Education, and International Cultural Studies. That first year teaching in Japan led to an invitation to serve as a founding full professor in the recently established School of Global Studies of Tama University in Tokyo, Japan; and, he continues to teach a series of core courses there. Just prior to that appointment, for the Autumn of 2006, he taught graduate courses as an invited Visiting Professor in the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. And, for the winter and spring terms of 2008 he held a visiting professorship in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, where he offered a graduate seminar on Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault.

Previously, during 2001 and 2002, he was a visiting scholar in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, respectively, at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany. Prior to his move to Japan, Chandler served on the faculties of both Johns Hopkins and Duke universities, in addition to holding previous invited visiting professorships at the Irvine and Davis campuses of the University of California. Known in particular as a scholar of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois (one of the major American intellectual and political figures of the 20th century) he has lectured throughout the United States, Europe and Japan over the past twenty years. Recently he edited a special issue of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review (6.3, 2006) on “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World.” Two of his most recently published essays are: “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought” in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts (50.3, 2008) and “Of Horizon: An Introduction to ‘The Afro-American’ by W. E. B. Du Bois -- circa 1894” in the Journal of Transnational American Studies (2.1, 2010). In addition his book manuscripts, The Problem of Pure Being: Annotations on W. E. B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro and X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought” are both under contract for publication with Fordham University Press.