He is the author of the critically acclaimed book "The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies," published by MIT Press in 2008. Wey-Gómez is working on a second book, titled "The Machine of the World: Nature’s Culture in the Early Spanish Colonial Americas," which examines the moral authority of the natural sciences in the production of a highly politicized European ethnography in the Americas during the 16th century.