Manuel Vicuña is Director of the Center for the Humanities at Diego Portales University. An historian and essayist, he is the author, among other books, of La belle époque chilena: Alta Sociedad y mujeres de elite en el cambio de siglo (2001, 2010), Historia del siglo XX chileno: Balance paradojal (2001, with Sofía Correa, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, Consuelo Figueroa and Claudio Rolle), Hombres de palabras: Oradores, tribunos y predicadores (2003), Voces de ultratumba: Historia del espiritismo en Chile (2006, 2019), Un juez en los infiernos: Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (2009), Fuera de campo. Retratos de escritores chilenos (2014), Reconstitución de escena (2016), Barridos por el viento: Historias del Fin del Mundo (2020) and Voces en el río (2022). His books have twice won the award for best essay of the year from the National Book and Reading Council. Originally dedicated to research in cultural history, his work is now oriented towards writing non-fiction literature. Manuel has been Director of the History Departments of the Alberto Hurtado and Diego Portales Universities. At the latter, he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and History, and Director of the Norbert Lechner Chair. In 2010, Manuel played a lead role in the program Algo habrán hecho por la historia de Chile, broadcast by the National Television of Chile on the bicentennial of the country’s independence. In 2006,  he was chief editor of the Report of the National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture, which was set up to establish the historical truth about the repression of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. He has also been advisor to the Chilean Ministry of Education.