Walter Mignolo

Biography

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. His research focuses on exposing modernity/coloniality as a machine that generates and maintains un-justices and to exploring decolonial ways of delinking from the modernity/coloniality.

In the last 15 years, the political dimension of his work has been largely devoted to the public sphere where he has worked with artists, curators and journalists, to write op-eds and to co-organise and co-teach summer schools in Middelburg, Bremen, UNC, and Duke University. He also delivers workshops for faculty and graduate students in South and Central America, Asia and Europe.

He is author of several books, including The Idea of Latin America (Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, co-edited with Elizabeth H. Boone (Duke University Press, 1994), and The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 1995) which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association.
Mignolo was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovaks prize (MLA) for The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1996) and the Frantz Fanon Prize by the Caribbean Philosophical Association for The Idea of Latin America (2006).

His work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Swedish, Rumanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Korean. He is an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa) of Wits University at Johannesburg. Recently, he joined the Dialogue of Civilisations (DOC) Programme Council as a senior adviser.
He received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris (1969–1973). Additionally, he received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree (2016) from the National University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and an Honorary Degree (2018) from the University of London-Goldsmith.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2022