Walter Mignolo

Argentine semiotician and professor

Walter D. Mignolo (born May 1, 1941) is an Argentine semiotician (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.

Mignolo received his BA in Philosophy from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina in 1969. In 1974 he obtained his Ph. D. from the École des Hautes Études, Paris. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. Since January 1993, Walter D. Mignolo has been the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. 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 the Politecnica Salesiana University. Since 2000, he has directed the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke. He has also been named Permanent Researcher at Large at the es in Quito, Ecuador. Recently, Mignolo has ventured into what he calls "decolonial aesthetics" writing on artists Pedro Lasch, Fred Wilson, and Tanja Ostojić. He contributed to Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, a book on the works of Pedro Lasch, edited by Lasch, published by Duke University Press.