Professor Lambert received a Ph.D. in 1995 in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from University of California at Irvine under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Prior to this he was a Fellow in the Center for Hermeneutic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, where he completed a Masters program in Theology and Literature, and graduate studies in French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1996, Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University and was later appointed as Chair in 2005, before leaving the department in 2008 to become the founding director of The SU Humanities Center until 2014, when he stepped down to focus on the creation of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a unique collaborative research network between Syracuse University, Cornell University, the University of Rochester, and the NY6 Liberal Arts Colleges in the CNY region funded by the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, He was the principal investigator between 2008 and 2019, and permanently established the CNY Humanities Corridor program through a six million dollar matching endowment award, which continues to fund the program "in perpetuity" through three separate endowments housed at Cornell University, University of Rochester and Syracuse University.
The CNY Humanities Corridor has been widely acknowledged as one of the most unique and successful collaborations of its kind and has served as a model for other regional consortia, such as “Humanities without Walls.” Since 2008, Professor Lambert has directed several other major multi-institutional research and interdisciplinary initiatives, including the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures (with Cary Wolfe, Rice University), the Trans-Disciplinary Media Studio (with SU School of Architecture) and The Perpetual Peace Project, a multi-lateral curatorial initiative partnered with Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the European Union National Institutes of Culture, the International Peace Institute, and the United Nations University, Utrecht University Centre for Humanities, and the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation (the Netherlands). In 2013, he was elected as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.
Author of eighteen books and critical editions, and over a hundred articles in peer reviewed journals and collected volumes, Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his general writings on the future of the Humanities, as well as his numerous scholarly writings on contemporary theory and continental philosophy, and; especially for his critical writings on the late-French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. He frequently lectures and teaches internationally and has been invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University, Ewha University, Seoul National University. In 2010-2011 he was appointed as a BK21 Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University and, between 2016-2021, as an International Scholar (IS) at Kyung-Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.
Currently, he is engaged in directing a new phase of the Perpetual Peace Project in response to the war in the Ukraine, and is completing a second volume of Philosophy After Friendship (Minnesota, 2017) on the figure of the partisan philosopher.