Omar G. Encarnación

Omar G. Encarnación (born 1962) is an American political scientist. He is Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he teaches comparative politics and Latin American and Iberian studies. He has published numerous books and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Current History, Foreign Affairs, Time, World Policy Journal, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of the forthcoming Framing Equality: The Politics of Gay Marriage Wars.

Education Omar G. Encarnación received degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and from Princeton University, where he was the recipient of the Presidential Fellowship, graduating with a Ph.D. in politics in 1997. The title of his dissertation was "Governing Regime Change: Social Concertation in Democratic and Market Transitions."

Scholarship Encarnación is a prolific scholar who has written extensively about democratization in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. His first two books centered on Spain. He is also a scholar of LGBTQ politics, including same-sex marriage and the concept of gay reparations. His academic writing has appeared in Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, West European Politics, Southern European Politics and Society, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Human Rights Quarterly, Ethics & International Affairs, and Latin American Research Review.

Publications (Books) Spanish Politics: Democracy After Dictatorship. Polity Press, 2008. Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2017. The Case for Gay Reparations. Oxford University Press, 2021.