CLARKSVILLE, TN – Austin Peay State University’s annual Asanbe Diversity Symposium will take place this February, featuring Dr. Walter Mignolo, the William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature, at Duke University.

At 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 28, Mignolo will lecture in the Trahern Theatre on “”Homogeneity and Diversity: We Are All Born Equal But Do Not Remain Equal Shortly After.” At 2:30 p.m. there will be a panel discussion in room 401 Trahern on “25 Years of Asanbe Diversity Symposia: Where We’ve Been and Where We Are Going.”Mignolo received his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études, Paris.  He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and he has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking and pluriversality.

Mignolo is also the director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He was associated researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, (2002-2018) and an Honorary Research Associate for CISA (Center for Indian Studies in South Africa), Wits University at Johannesburg (2015-2019). He was senior advisor of DOC (Dialogue of Civilizations) Research Institute, based in Berlin (2016-2020). He received a Doctor Honoris Causa Degree (2016) from the University National of Buenos Aires, Argentina and an Honorary Degree (2018) from the University of London-Goldsmith.

Among his books are: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995), Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), and The Idea of Latin America (2006). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, co-authored with Catherine Walsh, was published in 2018 and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, 2021. His works have been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Russian, Estonian, Polish, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Rumanian, Italian and Turkish.

The annual symposium was established in memory of Dr. Joseph Asanbe, APSU’s first professor of African and African-American literature. Born in Nigeria, Asanbe earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Indiana University. After joining the APSU faculty in 1987, Asanbe often expressed his vision of APSU as a diverse university where all people are valued.

The Asanbe Diversity Symposium is sponsored by the APSU Department of Languages and Literature and the APSU Office of Equity, Access & Inclusion.

For more information, contact Dr. Karen Sorenson, professor of French, by phone at (931) 221-6246 or by e-mail at sorensonk@apsu.edu.