Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is a Professor and Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. His work fundamentally recontextualizes Latin America's role in shaping Western modernity through historical analysis of science, abolitionism, and democratic thought. Education: PhD from University of Wisconsin His research interrogates historiographical categories like the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and Atlantic Age of Revolutions that have obscured Latin America's contributions to modernity. He demonstrates how manuscript petitions, not print culture, drove knowledge production and how colonial scribal practices created alternative cosmopolitanisms. Recent publications include Categories as Prisons (University Pennsylvania Press) challenging Atlantic historiography, and The Radical Spanish Empire (Harvard University Press) co-authored with Adrian Masters, which reclaims Spanish America's role in anti-slavery movements and systematic skepticism. His work appears in Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence and New World Objects of Knowledge series. Teaching includes courses on Colonial Latin America (LAS 366), Atlantic History (HIS 383M), and Urban Slavery (HIS 347N). He has extensive editorial experience co-editing Princeton Handbook of Atlantic History and Jesuit-Protestant Encounters series.
