Mauro J. Caraccioli
- Core Faculty in the ASPECT Program
- Department of Political Science
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Mauro José Caraccioli is an associate professor of political science and Core Faculty in the ASPECT Program at Virginia Tech. His interests span the history of political thought, the politics of nature and natural history, Global Latin America, and theories of scholarly reflexivity in a time of late-capitalism.
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.
His ongoing research includes: the global politics of translation and linguistic difference; feminist, indigenous, and Afro-descendent expressions of New World thought; extractivism and the geopolitics of knowledge; and narratives of planetary collapse in popular media and environmental scholarship. He is currently working on three projects: a co-edited handbook (with Einar Wigen, University of Oslo) on the study of interlingual relations in global politics; a study on the racial politics of historical writing in Spanish America; and lastly, a co-authored book (with Jack Amoureux, Wake Forest University) on the role of reflexivity in the global politics of the Anthropocene.
Caraccioli teaches courses in the History of Political Thought, Theories of Political Domination, Empire and Imperial Studies, Religion and Narrative, Global Latin America, Phenomenology and Its Others, and the Politics of Historiography more broadly. His work has been published in International Studies Review, Contemporary Political Theory, International Studies Perspectives, and History of Political Thought among other venues.
He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida in 2015.
