William Vaios Spanos (1924–2017) was a Heideggerian literary critic, a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, and co-founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2.

From J.J. Williams' 2006 article, "The Counter-Memory of Postmodernism: An Interview with William V. Spanos" in the The Minnesota Review, 67(67):

"William Spanos, co-founder and longtime editor of boundry 2, has worked over a long career to define the postmodern in both literature and in theory. In shepherding the journal as well as in his prolific writing, he has influenced the shape of contemporary criticism, investigating existentialism, poststructural theory, American studies, and the politics of the American imperium.

"Spanos began his career in a relatively traditional way, with his first book on The Christian Tradition in Modern British Verse Drama: The Poetics of Sacramental Time (1967), although it also drew on his interest in Christian existentialism. That interest also led to his editing the anthology A Casebook on Existentialism (1966), which introduced then-current strands in continental philosophy to US literary studies and from which developed his subsequent concern with Heidegger and post-structural theory.

"Spanos was the editor of boundry 2 from 1970 to 1986, when his former student Paul Bové became editor, and has continued to serve as a member of its editorial collective. much of his writing in the 1970s and 80s dovetails with the project of boundry 2 and was in the form of essays, such as "The Dectective and the Boundry: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination," boundry 2 1.1 (1972). [...] He also editied Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature (1979) and the Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism (with Bové and Daniel O'Hara; 1982), which gathers work by Edward Said, Euginio Donato, Evan Watkins, Jonathan Culler, Murray Kreiger, Stanley Fish, Joseph Riddel, Jonathan Arac, and many others from a symposium sponsored by boundry 2 held at Binghamton in 1978.

"Culminating two decades of thinking, since the 1990s Spanos has published The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (1993), Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (1993), The Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Cold War, the Canon, and the Struggle for American Literary Studies (1995), and America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (2000). He currently is completing three books and a memoir.

"Born in 1925 in New Hampshire, Spanos attended Wesleyan university (BA, 1950), Columbia University (MA, 1954), and the University of Wisconsin (PhD, 1964). After brief sojourns theaching at the University of Kentucky and Knox College, he has been a professor at Binghamton University since 1966, where he is Distinguished Professor and still teaches a course every term."

In 2010, Spanos published his memoir, In the Neighborhood of Zero, in which he recounted his experience in the U.S. Army in World War II. He was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and taken a prisoner of war to Dresden, Germany. There he survived the Allied firebombing of the city. The memoir discusses how this experience shaped his attitudes toward indifferent political power and the fallacy of a "just war."

Spanos died in 2017.