Daniel G. Williams

Fall 2026

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Daniel G. Williams is Professor of English Literature at Swansea University.

A native son of Aberystwyth in Wales, he first came to Harvard University as a ‘Special Student’ in African American Studies on a Frank Knox Fellowship in 1995. He was awarded an MA in Celtic Languages and Literatures for a thesis on the Harlem and Irish Renaissances in 1997 before returning to the UK to complete a PhD at Cambridge University.

He is Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales and Co-Director, with Kirsti Bohata, of CREW: the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. His research focuses on questions of ethnicity, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and minority culture, with particular emphasis on Wales, African American thought, and transatlantic intellectual history. He is the author of Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (2006), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales (2012), and Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015). He is the editor of several books including a collection of Raymond Williams’s writings Who Speaks for Wales? (2003/2021) and, most recently, The Werner Sollors Reader: Ethnicity, Cosmopolitanism and Particularism (2025).

A regular broadcaster and public intellectual in both Welsh and English, Williams has contributed to literary and cultural debates across academic and public platforms in the UK and internationally. He is also a tenor saxophonist with the Welsh jazz-folk group ‘Burum’. He is married to Sioned Williams, Member of the Senedd [Parliament] and the current Deputy First Minister of Wales. Their two children, Lowri and Dewi, are both in their early twenties.

Fellowship Project

On the Margins of ‘Man’: The Particularist Universalism of Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and Raymond Williams

‘On the Margins of Man’ examines how we can speak of a shared humanity while recognising the distinct cultural worlds in which people live. The project focuses on three influential postwar writers - Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison, and Raymond Williams - each of whom responded to the upheavals of fascism, racial segregation, and decolonisation by rethinking what it means to claim that something is universal. Through close readings of their essays, letters (both Ellison and Williams corresponded with Arendt), novels, and public debates, the project shows how notions of rights, belonging, and common humanity were reshaped from positions of exile, racial marginalisation, and minority national experience. By bringing their work into dialogue, the project offers an account of universalism as something not given in advance but formed through particular histories and everyday practices. It is timely now, as societies grapple with how to affirm what is held in common while recognising the force of cultural and national differences.