In this episode, Corinne Noirot speaks with Mauro Caraccioli about his recent book, Interlingual Relations: Global Politics in a Polyglot World (University of Michigan Press, 2026). The book is a volume of essays Mauro co-edited with Einar Wigen (University of Oslo). The chapters engage questions of language and translation in global politics, advancing a new research agenda for the study of translation in International Relations and demonstrating how linguistic mediation shapes political life across local, national, and international contexts.

Mauro José Caraccioli is Associate Professor of Modern Political Theory and Director of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Caraccioli is the author of Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021), which in 2023 received the Best Book Award from the Theory Section of the International Studies Association.

Your host for this episode, Corinne Noirot is a professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Virginia Tech.

After an extended break, Paul Quigley, Director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech, introduces the new season of Vox Humanities. With hosts Corinne Noirot and Sweta Baniya, and producer Joe Forte, Paul speaks about the decision to bring back the podcast, his hopes for what it may accomplish, and the reasons behind a key change in format. Beginning next week, the new season will drop episodes monthly during academic semesters.

Sylvester Johnson talks with Edward Polanco about ancestry, the Nahua peoples, ancient healing techniques, Gender, and settler colonialism.

Dr. Edward Polanco is a Kuskatanchanej – a person from Kuskatan (Western and Central El Salvador) – scholar of Mesoamerica. Although he was born in Los Angeles, CA, his ancestors are from Kuskatan and his parents fled their homeland due to political violence and instability. Dr. Polanco is committed to amplifying and centering Indigenous voices and perspectives in his research, his classroom, and on Virginia Tech’s campus. To achieve this, he works closely with the Latinx and Native communities on campus, and more broadly in the US and Latin America. Dr. Polanco is on leave in the Fall of 2023.

His first book, Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico; 1535-1660 (University of Arizona Press; in press, expected August 2024) examines healing ceremonial specialists among 16th and 17th-century Nahua people (Indigenous groups with diverse communities in Mexico and El Salvador) in Central Mexico. Dr. Polanco carefully analyzes the different healing tasks women and men had in their communities, he also unpacks the importance of women as titiçih (healing specialists), and he unearths how Spanish authorities attacked Native healers as they attempted to evangelize and hispanize Indigenous populations in New Spain (today known as Mexico and Central America).

He has published on Indigenous healing knowledge, and gendered understandings of the human body. Various fellowships and institutions have funded Dr. Polanco’s work, including the Fulbright-García Robles research grant, FLAS summer and AY fellowships, and a Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship. For more information and updates, please visit Professor Polanco's personal website.

Dr. Polanco’s teaching interests include Native history, Latin America, Mexico, El Salvador, Mesoamerica, sorcery, race, gender, and class. He has introduced various new courses to Virginia Tech that challenge students to think about the past from Indigenous perspectives.