Walter Mignolo

Walter Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Before coming to Duke in January, 1993, he taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and di/pluriversalities.

His recent publications on these latter topics include: The Idea of Latin America (2005),Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, co-edited with Elizabeth H. Boone (1994), and The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995) which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association. He is also author of Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999) and editor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate intelectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994-95). His current interests include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Mignolo co-edits the web dossier, Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. Professor Mignolo is the academic director of Duke in the Andes, an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean Studies in Quito, Ecuador at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana. . Since 2000, he has directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Professor Mignolo has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador. Please see Curriculum Vitae for additional information.