Tony Baugh PhD

Tony Baugh is an assistant professor of philosophy here at Coppin State University. His research mainly examines socialism and conservatism to locate regimes of harm articulated as Black suffering, centering the thought of C.L.R. James, Cornel West, and Huey P. Newton. By these means, he works to develop an understanding of theodicy as an activistic epistemology that conceives radicalism as integrationist unless divorced from the multifaceted and multidirectional assimilationist logics of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.

His PhD thesis, supervised by Tommy Curry, titled “Philosophies of suffering: exceptionalist and assimilationist theodicies of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Black American thought as foundational of twenty-first-century Black (neo)conservative epistemic retrogression,” earned him the PhD in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he became only the second Black person to do so in the university’s over-440-year history.

Currently, he is at work on two new research projects: the first is formulating a metaphysics of mendacity as correlative of idiocy in political leadership, analyzing the thought of C.L.R. James and William Desmond; the second is developing a politically philosophical accounting of moral apathy through an exegesis of The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin. Dr. Baugh has been published in The CLR James Journal and Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice. Also a theologian by training, he has a chapter contribution on homiletical theology in the book Race, Preaching, and Ricœur (2025) through Bloomsbury Academic.