Assistant Professor
211 Milbank Hall
4-9873
obentanc@barnard.edu

Orlando Bentancor received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) in 1997 and his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2005. Before joining the Barnard faculty he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (2005-2008) and he also held a visiting appointment at the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton (2007-2008).

Bentancor's main interests are: Colonial Latin American literatures and intellectual history; Medieval and Early Modern Spanish philosophy; literature, science, and technology; poststructuralist philosophy and postcolonial theory.

He is currently working on a draft of a book titled The Life of Metals in Potosí: Politics, Metaphysics, and Technology in the Colonial Andes, where he examines texts on colonial mining and metallurgy, a practice that was essential for the Spanish Empire. He is interested in reading colonial texts on mining in the light of their contemporary philosophy (Scholasticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermetic traditions) in order to understand both the historical genesis and the philosophical presuppositions of the modern narratives of Western scientific expansion. Bentancor has published articles in Hofstra Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.