Saint Anselm College

Dr. Jaime A. Orrego enters his 16th year on the Hilltop in 2024-25, serving the community as an Associate Professor of Spanish with research on the question of violence in Colombian literature. Named the Faculty Athletics Representative in August 2022, he uses a semiotic approach that focuses on the interactions between cultural space, individual desire and the events that unfold in the narratives.

Through this approach he develops a typology of narrative demonstrating how the view of the city, countryside, class system, and modernization constantly shifted perspectives while remaining profoundly engaged with the local realities in Colombia. Orrego also writes fiction, which focuses on the Colombian reality from the last thirty years, which deeply marked his childhood and adolescence.

He is a 1999 graduate of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), receiving a degree in Industrial Engineering, and earned his master’s degree in Latin American Literature from Illinois State University in 2022. Most recently, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2008, also in Latin American Literature.