Nayeli Riano

Biography

Nayeli Riano is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Center for Humanities. She is a political theorist specializing in the history of political thought. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. Her research examines how political concepts and their embedded discourses move across historical, cultural, and linguistic traditions, tracing how temporal frameworks—such as progress, decline, and historical rupture—inform arguments within liberal, republican, and revolutionary thought. She covers the early modern period, the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on Latin America and Europe. She also works on the role of literature in articulating and contesting political meaning, and pursues broader questions concerning the changing epistemic and methodological foundations of political thought. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Philosophical Society and the American Political Science Association, among others.

Riano earned her Ph.D. in Political Theory from Georgetown University (2026), her M.Litt. in Intellectual History from the University of St. Andrews (2018), and her B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania (2017).

Current Projects

Riano’s current project examines how the paired concepts of civilization and barbarism shaped political thought in nineteenth‑century Latin America. It traces how these mutually dependent yet antagonistic concepts emerged as temporalized categories in the eighteenth‑century European Enlightenment, where they helped construct the New World as a site of moral and historical difference. The project shows how these concepts entered the Latin American imaginary, and how thinkers from the region mobilized these concepts to articulate theories of progress, human nature, and societal development amid revolution, post‑colonial nation‑building, civil war, and struggles over cultural identity. By recovering these debates, the project illuminates how political concepts—and the languages that carry them—shift meaning across time and place. It contends that the very instability of concepts like civilization and barbarism has contributed to their resilience, enabling their continual reinvention in modern political imaginaries.

Publications

Articles & Book Chapters
 

“The Pueblo and the Politics of History and Historiography in the Writings of Andrés Bello and Francisco Bilbao,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 86 (2025), 693-725.

“Juan-Jacobo’s Paradox: The 1750 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in Spanish America ,” History of Political Thought, 46 (2025), 472–500.

“Bringing Intellectual History Into Dry Dock,” Modern Intellectual History (2025), 1-12.  

“‘A Gadding Passion’: Envy and the role of ‘civil and moral’ knowledge in Francis Bacon’s political thought,” History of European Ideas, 49 (2023), 909-925.

“An Aesthetic Arbiter of Politics: Revisiting George Santayana’s Concept of the Psyche,” Overheard In Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 39 (2021), 71–88.