Dr. Omar Rivera
  • Director of Graduate Studies
  • Associate Professor of Philosophy

Areas of Specialization

  • Latin American Philosophy (Pre-Columbian to 21st Century, including Latin American Marxisms)
  • Latinx Philosophy
  • 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy (especially Phenomenology and Hermeneutics)
  • Decolonial Philosophy (Epistemology, Race Theory, Feminist Theory)
  • Aesthetics (including Latin American and Latinx Art)
  • Ancient Greek Philosophy

Contributes to Departmental Research Strengths In

  • Continental Philosophy
  • Philosophies of the Global South

Biography

Omar Rivera (PhD, Penn State) grew up in Lima, Peru, and was trained in philosophy in the United States and Germany. He was a DAAD research scholar at the university of Freiburg, Germany, where he focused on the relationship between phenomenology and Ancient Greek Philosophy. After earning his doctorate, he developed a further expertise in Latin American and Latinx political philosophy and aesthetics. He is the author of Delimitations of Latin American Philosophy: Beyond Redemption (Indiana University Press, 2019).  In 2018-2019 he was awarded the ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship and was a research faculty at LLILAS-Benson at the University of Texas in Austin. During this residency he completed his second book Cosmological Aesthetics in Andean Philosophy: Racial Embodiment and Decolonial Resistance (currently under review). He has two more book manuscripts underway, Shadow Knowledge: Resistant Epistemologies in Latin American and Latinx Philosophy and The Body of The Earth: Elemental Settings of Border Aesthetics. Due to his research, he splits his time when possible between Austin, TX, and Cusco, Peru.


Educational Background

  • Ph.D. , The Pennsylvania State University, 2007

Scholarly Achievements

  • Deliminations of Latin American Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2019)

  • Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance (Bloomsbury Press)