Álvaro Santana Acuña is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Whitman College and an instructor at the Harvard Summer School. He studies the intersection of material culture and social orders and is particularly interested in how people use objects as vehicles for the transmission of dominant cultural values and norms. His scholarly work has appeared in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, American Sociologist, Social History, and Journal of World Literature and has received awards from the American Sociological Association. He is the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia University Press, 2020), a groundbreaking, award-winning study of the imagination, production and circulation of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. With Arturo Rodríguez Morató, he is co-editor of Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is a contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times in Spanish, El País and El Mundo.