Santiago M. Quintero , Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame , and the first graduate from our new PhD Program in Spanish (2017), has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.
Santiago has taught multiple courses at Notre Dame, including the advance undergraduate seminar Uncanny Modernity: Monsters in Latin American Literature and Culture (S.XVI-XXI) and Introduction to Hispanic Literatures and Culture. He is known as a committed and highly successful teacher; last year he won the 2016-1017 Kaneb Center Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. In Spring 2017, he defended his dissertation Modernity in the Blood: Vampirism and Culture in Latin America 20th-21st Centuries under the direction of professor Carlos A. Jáuregui . There, he analyzed a representative selection of canonical and non-canonical texts, films and art installations about vampires—and more generally about the consumption of blood—from late 19th century to the present.
Santiago’s publications include “Postdicatdura chilena en ‘El planeta de los monstruos” (2016), an essay on Raúl Zurita and Roberto Bolaño in a volume edited by Valeria Wagner, Silvia Spitta, and Adriana López-Labourdette; and “Modernity Sucks: Modernista Vampires and the Latin American Tradition of the Undead” in The Global Vampire on Page and Stage, edited by Catherine Coker (forthcoming, 2019). At Notre Dame, Santiago was an active member of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Institute for Latino Studies. He also participated in numerous important activities on campus. He was co-applicant with Professor Jauregui, and other graduate students for a large Research Grant from the Kellogg Institute and the Center for Creative Computing Annual Research, with the proposal “Ecuador Unframed. Dynamic Art and Radical Democracy in a Mural by Oswaldo Guayasamín.” This resulted in an international traveling interactive exhibit / installation (2014-2016) . For the last three years, Santiago also collaborated with one of Notre Dame’s most prestigious Pre-College programs, working with faculty from the Departments of American Studies and Television, Theater and Film on Leadership Seminars in American Popular Culture and Social Change . More recently, Santiago joined the Luksburg awarded project University and Catholicism: Memory Studies as a Project of Cultural Politics directed by professor María Rosa Olivera-Williams, a member of his dissertation’s committee.
Santiago has been an active scholar, an engaging and passionate teacher, and a very collegial member of our community. We congratulate him and he surely will be missed.