Ricardo Vega Leon
Assistant Professor
Fields/Keywords
- Political Theory
- Political Economy
- Race and Empire
- Slavery and Abolition
Contact Information
- Office: Building 47, Room 11Q
- E-mail: rvegaleo@calpoly.edu
About Ricardo Vega Leon
My research focuses on the history of political thought and political economy, the political theory of empire and race, and the transnational history and politics of slavery and abolition. My book manuscript, tentatively titled Capitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism after the End of Slavery, develops a conception of capitalist abolitionism to explain how the emancipation projects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal political economists ideologically reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism in the British and French Caribbean, Cuba, and the U.S. South. My work has been published in Theory & Event and is forthcoming in Social Research.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst (2024)
Selected Publications
“The Tensions of Abolitionism and Racial Capitalism.” Social Research 92, no. 4 (Forthcoming).
“Tocqueville on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean: The Preemptive Dispossession and Proletarianization of Black Workers.” Theory & Event 27, no. 3 (2024): 481-509.