Alejandro Quintero Mächler
Alejandro Quintero Mächler holds a holds a B.A. in History (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá), a B.A. in Philosophy (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá), an M.A. in Philosophy (New School for Social Research, NSSR), and a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures (Columbia University in the City of New York).
His research interests revolve around 19th Century Latin American Literature, Culture and Intellectual History, with an emphasis on Ideology, Religion and Conservative Thought. His work has focused mainly on Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.
Alejandro’s first book, Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX. Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica (2023), brings together a collection of essays on 19th Century Spanish American Literature, Culture and History. The book covers such wide-ranging topics as the 19th Century experience of time, the sacrificial mentality of the era, the idea of a Spanish American Middle Ages, the concept of genealogy, the metaphors used to understand emancipation, the poetical links between history and painting, the notion of monument, and Spanish American Orientalism, among many others.
His second book manuscript, titled Bleeding Nations: Blood Discourses and the Interpretation of Violence in mid-19thCentury Spanish America (1838-1870), examines the connection between violence and Nation-building projects. It peruses what he terms “blood discourses,” a religious and physiological semantic field of continental –if not global– extension based upon literal and metaphoric meanings of “blood,” in three revealing case-studies: Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. It situates these discourses at the very core of how Spanish American intellectuals thought, wrote, and visualized their emerging nations amidst violent, critical times; that is, how they diagnosed their pressing problems and prescribed specific solutions to them.
Currently, Alejandro is working on the Spanish American travel writing tradition, specifically on voyages to the Holy Land and the role they played in consolidating, beyond nationally-circumscribed borders, a Catholic idea of civilization and modernity in the late 19th Century –precisely when a rival conception of a scientific and technological modernity was on the rise.
His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Literatura Mexicana, Prismas, the Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura and the Hispanic American Historical Review, among others.