April 25, 2024
Santiago Acosta left his native Venezuela in 2011 to continue his graduate studies in the United States. He started out at San Francisco State University, then headed to the opposite side of the country to do his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and then postdoc work at SUNY-Old Westbury on Long Island.
Now an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, Acosta says he returns to Venezuela most every year, even as the country has plunged into economic and social turmoil under an authoritarian regime.