David Charles Wright-Carr

David Wright began his university studies at the University of Michigan and Northern Michigan University. He moved to San Miguel de Allende (Guanajuato, Mexico) in 1976 to complete the Bachelor of Fine Arts program and went on to obtain the degree of Master of Fine Arts at the Instituto Allende. In 2005 he concluded his Ph.D. studies in Social Sciences at El Colegio de Michoacán. His dissertation project explores the relations between culture, language, pictorial communication, and writing among the Otomi people during the pre-Hispanic and early colonial periods. Since 1980 he has worked as professor and administrator in several institutions of higher education in the states of Guanajuato and Querétaro. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Guanajuato, and in 2012 he migrated to the Department of Visual Arts at the same institution. He has published widely on the culture, history and art of ancient Mesoamerica, New Spain, and modern Mexico; on native languages of central Mexico, particularly Nahuatl and Otomi; and on embodied aesthetic theory and its applications in the study of visual languages. Wright has been awarded research grants and fellowships by the University of Texas at Austin, the Department of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Trustees for Harvard University), the Newberry Library and the Princeton University Library. He has served as historical consultant to the State Council for Culture and the Arts in Querétaro, and as a member of the Committee of Experts of the World Conference on Linguistic Rights (Barcelona, 1996). He is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of History.