Alvaro Santana-Acuna is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Whitman College. He holds a BA in History (University of La Laguna), MA in Social Sciences (University of Chicago), and MA and PhD in Sociology (Harvard University). He studies political and cultural objects, their role in producing collectively shared meanings, and their contribution to the maintenance of long-lasting social orders. He is the co-editor of Toward a New Sociology of Art (Gedisa, 2017) and author of Ascent to Glory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), in which he analyzes how Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude became a global classic. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, and El Pais, among other media. He is the recipient of multiple professional awards; most recently, the 2017 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association.