Diego von Vacano

Professor
Department of Political Science
College of Liberal Arts

Diego von Vacano’s research interests are political theory, political philosophy, the history of political thought, comparative political theory, and Hispanic/Latin American thought. His work focuses mainly on comparative political theory (modern Latin American and European political thought) and also on immigration ethics and race and ethnicity.

Von Vacano will use his Arts & Humanities Fellowship to focus his efforts on his upcoming book, Transcultural Democracy. This book argues that, while democracy is in a fragile state (especially in the United States), we ought to look south of the border to learn lessons about how to buttress popular sovereignty. “In particular, ethnic participation, gender inclusion, and more open migration regimes are cardinal to what I call ‘transcultural democracy,’” he says.

In 2003, von Vacano received his doctorate in political science from Princeton University. He joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2005 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2012.

External honors include a 2009-10 fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; a 2008-09 member fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, at Princeton, NJ; and a career enhancement fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He will be a visiting professor of political science at Yale University during 2017-18.

Von Vacano is the author of The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory, published in 2006, and The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought, published in 2014.

In addition, he authored a commissioned article, The Scope of Comparative Political Theory, for the Annual Review of Political Science in 2015, as well as refereed journal articles and book chapters. He has presented twenty-two scholarly papers at conferences and symposia.