Deputy Director 21-22 / Director 22-24
Fellow in the 2013-2014 cohort then from October to December 2014.
Deputy director from September 2021 to July 2022, Director from July 2022 to July 2024
Luis Mora Rodríguez is an associate professor and researcher at the University of Costa Rica (Central America) and also directs the Doctorate in Latin American Studies at the National University, Costa Rica. He holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University René Descartes, (Paris), as well as a Master in Management (MIM) from the ESSEC Business School (Cergy-Pointoise), and is currently a researcher in the ConnecCaribbean Project (European Union's Horizon 2020), focusing on Latin American and Caribbean philosophy. His research focuses on European political thought during the conquest of America (discourse on otherness, emergence of modern imperial practices, theories of just war). Since 2017, Luis Mora Rodríguez has been a member of the Board of Directors of the French Network of Institutes of Advanced Studies.
When Europe meets the Other: history, otherness and imperialism in the writings of Gomes Eanes de Zurara and Bartolomé de Las Casas
The project developed by Luis MORA RODRIGUEZ during his residency at the Nantes-Institute for Advanced Study is at the crossroads between history and political philosophy. It is driven by the will to build a history of mentalities that shows the European intellectual development at the brink of its first modernity (15th-16th centuries). This research first intends to compare the imperial policy of the Portuguese Kingdom in West Africa with the policy of the Spanish Catholics Monarchy in West Indies through two major works on travel historiography : The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea by Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1453) and History of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1560). The aim of this work is to establish a typology of Otherness in these works in order to underline how the Other is understood and described by both authors in two situations of imperial expansion, exploration and encounter.
Luis MORA RODRIGUEZ wishes to build a portrait of the European consciousness emerging from both these texts in the confrontation and/or the negotiation with non-European Otherness.
