Stefan Terrazas

Professional Bio

Stefan Terrazas is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He previously attended the London School of Economics, where he graduated with an MSc with distinction in Philosophy and Public Policy. He also holds a Licentiature in Philosophy from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, the city where he was born and raised. During his time there he conducted research on food sovereignty for the Bolivian government. His research lies at the intersection of Latin American philosophy, the history of social and political thought, and the critical philosophy of race. His current focus is on early colonial discourses surrounding the Spanish Conquest of the Americas with a particular interest in religious conversion, “purity of blood,” and African and Indigenous slavery in the “long” sixteenth century. This had led him to investigate the Disputation of Valladolid, Spain (1550-51), between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda, its background and aftermath. His dissertation examines the continuity of early colonial thought with later philosophical approaches to race and nation-building as they relate to colonial domination (including the “coloniality of gender”) in Latin America. Stefan is the recipient of the 2024 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought awarded by the American Philosophical Association (APA) and the 2024-2025 Vice-Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Student Persistence Scholarship conferred by Penn State.