Daniel Santiago Sáenz, M.Phil

Daniel Santiago Sáenz was born in Medellín, Colombia. Later, as an uninvited settler in Tiohtià:ke, unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, today known as Montreal, Canada, he earned a BA in Religion and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Comparative Literature at Columbia University in Lenapehoking/NYC. He has taught several undergraduate courses, including Elementary and Intermediate Spanish, a survey of Hispanic cultural production (antiquity through the colonial period), introductions to early modern and colonial art histories, and Columbia University’s flagship seminar known as Literature Humanities. In 2024, he received the University’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. His dissertation examines pedagogical practices and innovations of the Franciscan Order in New Spain in relation to the development of visual languages in the early modern transatlantic world, with special attention to the Rhetorica Christiana (1579) by Diego Valadés. He has been awarded fellowships by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (MA, 2016–2017; PhD, 2018–2022) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (MA, 2017–2018; PhD, 2018–2022 in name only). Other areas of interest include the visual culture of masculinities and contemporary Latin American art.