Mauro José Caraccioli is Associate Professor of Modern Political Theory in the Department of Politic Science. From 2015-2026, he was Core Faculty in the interdisciplinary ASPECT Doctoral Program. He currently serves as the Chair of the Committee on Recruitment and Program Promotion for the Department. 

Born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Caraccioli grew up in Miami, Florida and pursued his undergraduate studies at Florida International University (B.A. in Philosophy and International Relations; M.A. in International Studies), was a Graduate Fellow in Political Geography at Florida State University (2009-2010), and received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Florida in 2015.

Trained as a historian of political thought, Caraccioli’s research and teaching covers questions of ecological, religious, and imperial politics through various methodologies, drawing from intellectual history, cultural studies, and interpretive social science.

Caraccioli’s first book, Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021), examines the interplay of faith, nature, and empire in Colonial Spanish America and the natural histories produced by early modern Spanish missionaries to the New World. By tracing a distinct genre of naturalist political thought in their writings, he documents how philosophical wonder was used to broaden empirical knowledge of the New World as well as guide conquest and colonization. In 2023, Writing the New World won the Best Book Award for the International Studies Association’s Theory Section. A special Book Forum was published in the journal Millennium in honor of the award.

 Caraccioli also recently published a co-edited volume (with Einar Wigen, University of Oslo) titled, Interlingual Relations: Global Politics in a Polyglot World (University of Michigan Press, 2026). Their book shows how translation is at the heart of global politics, building on emergent literature on translation in International Relations (IR) to propose a unique research agenda for scholars of global politics, offering multiple directions and sets of principles for sustained study.

Caraccioli is currently working on a cultural history of the Cold War in Latin America, which he recently presented at the Virginia Tech Center for the Humanities in a talk titled, “The Repeating Self: Geopolitics and Knowledge-Making in Contemporary Latin America,” in November 2025.