Santiago Quintero was born in Bogot\u00e1, Colombia. But his father was from the country\u2019s central Andean region, while his mother came from the northern Caribbean region.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I\u2019m a little bit from all over the country,\u201d said Quintero, an assistant professor in Furman\u2019s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.<\/p>\n
After graduating from Universidad de los Andes in Bogot\u00e1, he continued his academic career in the United States. He received an M.A. from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and in 2017 became the first to earn a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Notre Dame.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Quintero came to Furman, where he teaches courses in elementary and intermediate Spanish and the literature of Spanish America. He has also taught courses in the Latin American and LatinX studies minor and the film studies minor.<\/p>\n
As an educator, Quintero strives to avoid cultural pigeonholes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot kick my background out of myself,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019ve made an effort to not be the only exposure my students have to Hispanic culture. I try to include different aspects of Hispanic traditions in my classes and highlight that Hispanidad<\/em> contains a myriad of traditions, backgrounds and peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n For a May Experience course, Performing Memory in Latin America, co-taught with Eunice Rojas, an associate professor of modern languages and literatures, he brought a Latinx hip-hop group to campus for a concert and a workshop on ethnicity, social justice and community building He has also done scholarship on monsters \u2013 \u201cfrom bloodthirsty vampires and gigantic nuclear insects to flesh-eating cannibals and sentient cyborgs\u201d \u2013 in Latin American cultures and how these fearsome depictions help us understand fundamental notions regarding our identity, sociability, and even our own humanity.<\/p>\n Quintero hopes to help his students gain perspective on the wide range of cultures outside their own.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important that they see that, although I am an international faculty and a brown professor in a largely white school, my experience is not the only one,\u201d he said. \u201cI come from Colombia, and I\u2019ve been privileged in many ways, so my experience is definitely not the same as a student, a faculty member or staff member who comes from Mexico, Per\u00fa or the Philippines.\u201d<\/p>\n For Quintero, Hispanic Heritage Month is an essential celebration but also \u201ca little bit of a Catch-22.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, the first thing that this month should mean is awareness \u2013 awareness of Hispanic heritage\u2019s uniqueness,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the goal for this celebration should also be normalization. I hope Hispanic Heritage Month summons people into exploring the richness of the Hispanic community, but also that it ultimately, little by little, helps us normalize diversity in our workspaces, in our teaching and, ultimately in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The associate professor of modern languages and literatures sees Hispanic Heritage Month as an opportunity for \u201cawareness and normalization.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":19908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-modern-languages-and-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}