UTSA Brackenridge lecture series presents author Walter Mignolo March 1-2

Walter Mignolo

By Kris Rodriguezr
Public Affairs Specialist

(Feb. 28, 2011)--The UTSA Department of English and the College of Liberal and Fine Arts will present author Walter Mignolo for two lectures in the Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series March 1-2 at the UTSA Main Campus. Both lectures are free and open to the public.

• Mignolo will speak on "Crossing Gazes and the Silence of the Indians: Theodore de Bry and Guaman Poma de Ayala," at 7 p.m., Tuesday, March 1 in the Arts Building Art Gallery.
• At 2 p.m., Wednesday, March 2, he will speak on "Decolonial Aesthetics: On Geopolitics of Knowing and Sensing" in the Business Building University Room (2.06.04).

Mignolo is the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. He also holds joint appointments in cultural anthropology and romance studies. Before his time at Duke, Mignolo taught at the Universities of Toulouse in Indiana and Michigan.

Mignolo has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory. His research centers on various aspects of the modern/colonial world including concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, trans-modernity, border thinking and di/pluriversalities.

His recent publications 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 also wrote "Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking" (1999) and is editor of "Capitalismo y geopolitica del conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofia de la liberacion en el debate intelectual contemporananeo" (2000) and "The Americas: Loci of Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions" (1994-1995). His current interests include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Mignolo co-edits the web dossier Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. He is the academic director of Duke in the Andes, an interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Andean studies in Quito, Ecuador, at Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador and the Universidad Politecnica Salesiana.

He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and his bachelor's degree in philosophy and literature from the Universidad de Cordoba in Spain.

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Supported by the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, the UTSA Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Department of English, Department of Anthropology and the College of Liberal and Fine Arts.