About Me

My name is Walter Mignolo and I received a Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études, Paris in 1974.  I have published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and in recent years I years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking and pluriversality.

I am the director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. I was associated researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, (2002-2018) and an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa), Wits University at Johannesburg (2015-2019). I was also the senior advisor of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, based in Berlin (2016-2020). I received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree (2016) from the University National of Buenos Aires, Argentina and an Honorary Degree (2018) from the University of London-Goldsmith.

Among my books are: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995), Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), and The Idea of Latin America (2006). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, co-authored with Catherine Walsh, was published in 2018 and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, 2021. My writing has been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Estonian, Polish, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Rumanian, Italian and Turkish.

I hope you enjoy this blog. If you have questions or comments, please contact me by email using this site’s contact form.