Ernesto Capello

Ernesto Capello joined the Macalester faculty in 2008 and is a Professor of Latin American History. Born in California, Professor Capello was raised in Quito, the Andean capital of Ecuador. He received his PhD from the University of Texas in 2005 and served on the faculty of the University of Vermont before coming to the Twin Cities.

Professor Capello teaches introductory, intermediate and advanced courses in Latin American history that emphasize the intersection between local and global identity, racial difference and power, and the relationship between arts, politics, and the state. He also offers courses specifically targeting the history of the Andes, the Amazon, and modern urban history.

His scholarship emphasizes transnational imaginaries and encounters, urban history, visual culture, and the history of cartography. These currents intersect in his first book, City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) which posits six chronotopes – or narrative configurations of space-time – that provided a framework for Quito residents to navigate the challenges of a city undergoing the dislocation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century modernization. His writings have appeared in various journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America including the Latin American Research Review, City, Araucaria, and Procesos. He is currently developing two new book projects, one investigating commemorative French and Ecuadorian cartographic collaboration in the early twentieth century and another examining hemispheric responses to Nelson Rockefeller’s 1969 Presidential Mission to Latin America.