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Georgetown360

Santiago Bestilleiro Lettini

Santiago Bestilleiro Lettini is a historian of Latin America. His work focuses on the dialogue between political, economic, and environmental history in the Río de la Plata. Santiago’s dissertation, The Greater Pampas: An Ecological Region of the Atlantic World in the Long Nineteenth Century, analyzes the transformation of the transnational grasslands that currently cover eastern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil between 1770 and 1920. His research explores the region’s role in the Atlantic economy, and how representations of its landscape as a “desert” gave way to its perception as a “resource.” In the spring of 2025, Santiago was a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. He is currently a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Santiago is from Buenos Aires, and before coming to Georgetown, he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.