Romano was a writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He teaches at Ursinus College and the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. He previously taught philosophy at Bennington College. In 1981, Romano reviewed books about philosophers for The Village Voice Literary Supplement and one book for The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Romano contributed an article on Umberto Eco to Oxford University Press's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. In 1993, Romano wrote an essay for Danto and His Critics entitled, "Looking Beyond the Visible: The Case of Arthur C. Danto," about art critic Arthur Danto. In his essay, Romano sets up a dichotomy between "pragmatism" and "Hegelianism" and finds statements in Danto's books that he claims fit into one of these two schools of thought. The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, includes a proposal by Romano to set up a World Court of Philosophy in which appointed philosophers would stipulate philosophical conclusions. He wrote America the Philosophical, a book with the main claim that the current United States has the "most philosophical culture in the history of the world." In 2013 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. In June 2020 Romano was at the center of a controversy within the board of the National Book Critics Circle, on which Romano has served periodically since the 1990s. In private communications between board members that were later leaked on social media, Romano objected to parts of the NBCC board's forthcoming statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and characterized the statement's overall message as "absolute nonsense". The fallout from his comments, which some of his fellow NBCC board members viewed as racist, spurred waves of resignations by more than half of the NBCC board members, leaving the future of the institution and its leadership uncertain.
In the October 18, 2009 issue of The Chronicle in "Heil Heidegger!", citing Heidegger's well-known past Nazi affiliations, Romano was highly critical of Martin Heidegger's work and its continued acceptance amongst American academics and intellectuals. The article was a review of the publication in English of French philosopher :fr:Emmanuel Faye|Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, highly critical of Heidegger for the same reason. Romano called on librarians to stop stocking the collected works of the German philosopher, which appear under the term Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. This controversial article renewed public dialogue about the relation between a person's politics and the merit of their work.
The publication of "the most controversial by far" Only Words book review, written by Romano, provoked a strong reaction with his imagined description of himself raping the author, Catharine MacKinnon. This performative counterexample to MacKinnon's apparent contention that a rape in words is equivalent to a rape in deeds intensified the debate about legal sanctions against pornography. The philosopher Nancy Bauer in How to Do Things With Pornography described it as "a shockingly clueless and callous review." David Gates wrote, "Free-speech stalwart Nat Hentoff jumped in—on MacKinnon's side, claiming Romano 'set out to debase person, along with her ideas.'" Romano said in defense of this review, "The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested by a good example."
Philip Roth
In a 2007 book review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, Romano revived the long-standing controversy over the extent that Roth's fiction is autobiographical. He used Claire Bloom's 1996 memoir Leaving a Doll's House as proof that Roth's books are "more autobiographical than imaginative."
Richard Rorty
In a 2007 elegy of Richard Rorty, Romano's characterization of his subject's originality and creativity drew an extended refutation from the philosopher Brian Leiter.
Books
He wrote America the Philosophical, a book with the main claim that the current United States has the "most philosophical culture in the history of the world."
