He has written extensively on a broad range of subjects, including theatricality, fictionality, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and ethics, religious moderation, and theories of mediation.
at the University of Minnesota in 1992, he met Slavoj Žižek, who was completing a visiting professorship there and whose work has had a lasting influence on his thinking.
His doctoral thesis, "Theatricality and Presence: a Phenomenology of Space and Spectacle in Early Modern France and Spain," was written under the direction of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
[2][3] William Egginton is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses (2018), The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2023), and Alejandro Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2024).
[7] Egginton is the co-author of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do?