Robert L. Bernasconi (born 1950) is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.
He is known as a reader of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and for his work on the concept of race.
In the fall of 2009 he moved from Memphis to the philosophy department at Pennsylvania State University.
In addition to extensive work on Heidegger and Levinas, Bernasconi has written on Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and numerous others.
In the early 1990s Bernasconi began to develop an interest in the concepts of race and racism, particularly in relation to the history of philosophy.