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Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Nicolás Wey Gόmez

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Nicolás Wey Gόmez

Professor of History
B.A., Brandeis University, 1986; M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 1987; M.A., 1991; Ph.D., 1996. Associate Professor, Caltech, 2010; Professor, 2010-.

Profile

Nicolás Wey Gόmez studies the histories of exploration, empire, race, and globalization in the early modern Iberian world. His work on Spain and Portugal examines the role that science, technology, and related fields played in the explosion of empirical knowledge that prefigured the Scientific Revolution, as well as their role in the forging of global empire and modern concepts of race.

His first book, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, appeared in the series Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology by The MIT Press in 2008. This book tells the story of Columbus's momentous exploration of the Caribbean Basin as part of early modern Europe's greatly consequential bid for the natural and human resources of tropical latitudes.

His current projects include a biography of Christopher Columbus titled "What Columbus Discovered," and a general history of the first one hundred years of global exploration by Portugal and Spain titled "Latitude: How Europe Invented the Global South (1415-1522)."

Wey Gόmez received his PhD in Latin American Literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1996 and taught at MIT and Brown University prior to joining Caltech.

Research Summary
Intellectual History; Origins and Foundations of Science; Literature and History; Visual Culture; History of Exploration, Empire, Race, and Globalization; Hispanic Studies
Selected Awards
  • Associated Students of Caltech (ASCIT) Teaching Award - 2014
  • Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, awarded to The Tropics of Empire by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) - 2009
  • Honorable Mention, awarded to the MIT Press for The Tropics of Empire in the category of World History and Biography of the 2008 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards).
Caltech Affiliations
External Affiliations
  • Associate of the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

Selected Publications

Books

  • The Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Ed. Jed. Z. Buchwald. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2008. xxiv + 592 pp. + 46 figs.

Essays

  • Las Casas contra Colón: La geopolítica de Alberto Magno en la polémica de las Indias (Las Casas against Columbus: Albertus Magnus's geopolitics in the polemics of the Indies. In Alberto Magno, De natura loci. Edición crítica de Felipe Castañeda, Andrea Lozano Vazquez, et al. Bogotá: Ediciones UNIANDES, 2026.
  • Aristotle and the American Tropics: The Politics of Place in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (1526). [Under review].
  • The Great World-Machine: The Discovery of America, the Revolution of the Orbs, and the Rise of Empire in the Tropics / La gran máquina del mundo: El descubrimiento de América, la revolución de los orbes, y el imperio en los trópicos. In Machina / Medium / Apparatus. Ed. Karla Jasso and Anna More. Ciudad de Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana; INBA-CONACULTA. [Forthcoming].
  • Memorias de la zona tórrida: naturalismo clásico y tropicalidad en el Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (1526) de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Revista de Indias 259 (2014): 609-632.
  • Los trópicos del imperio: Cristóbal Colón y el sur en la empresa de las Indias. In La pluma es la lengua del alma: Ensayos en honor de E. Michael Gerli (The Pen is the Soul's Tongue: Studies in Honor of E. Michael Gerli). Ed. José Manuel Hidalgo. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011.
  • The Politics of Light: Al-Kindī's Optics and the Vindication of the American Tropics in Bartolomé de las Casas's Apologética historia sumaria (1527-1561). In Early Modern Eyes, ed. Walter Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, pp. 11-54. Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture. Ed. K. A. E. Enenkel. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
  • A Poetics of Dismemberment: The Book of Job and the Cannibals of Cariay in Columbus's Account of the Fourth Voyage. Colonial Latin American Review 16.1 (2007): 109-123.
  • The Jealous and the Curious: Freud, Paranoia, and Homosexuality in Cervantes's Poetics. In Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies,ed.A. J. Cruz and C. B. Johnson, 170-198. Hispanic Issues. Ed. Nicholas Spadaccini. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000.
  • Anselmo's Eating Disorder (I.33-35) In Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Diana de Armas Wilson, 814-821. A volume of the Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.
  • "Nuestro Padre el Sol": Scholastic Cosmology and the Cult of the Sun in Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios reales. Latin American Literary Review 26.52 (1998): 19-26. Special issue on Colonial Studies. Guest Editor Verónica Salles-Reese.
  • Cannibalism as Defacement: Columbus's Account of the Fourth Voyage. Journal of Hispanic Philology 16.2 (1992): 195-208.
  • ¿Dónde está Garcilaso? La oscilación del sujeto en la formación de un discurso transcultural (Where is Garcilaso? The self's displacement in the formation of a transcultural discourse). Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34 (1991): 7-31.