Lorena Albert Ferrando

New Cabell Hall 463

Lorena Albert Ferrando is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Her research sits at the intersection of philology, the history of linguistics, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge, with a particular interest in the institutions, practices, and networks through which ideas about Spanish acquire scholarly and cultural authority.

Her work examines the production and circulation of linguistic and philological knowledge across Spain, Latin America, and the United States, particularly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is interested in language ideologies, the institutional history of Hispanic Studies, the history of Spanish language teaching in the United States, and the ways scholarly practices participate in constructing linguistic, cultural, and territorial communities. Her current book project, Ink Frontiers, explores these questions through the history of Spanish philology in the Americas.

Her scholarship has appeared in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Hispania, Boletín de Filología, and Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, and is forthcoming in Revista Hispánica Moderna. Since 2024, she is also the PI of the international collaborative project Hacia la filología crítica: autoanálisis de un oficio, which brings together scholars working across different national and disciplinary traditions to reflect critically on philological practice, its institutional histories, and the assumptions and structures of authority that shape the production of knowledge about language and literature. The project has resulted in a collective publication currently under review.

Before joining UVA, she held teaching and academic positions at the University of Florida, the University of St Andrews, and Princeton University, where she also served as Assistant Director of the Princeton in Spain Program. Her professional trajectory has spanned higher education in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Education

Ph.D. in Spanish: Linguistics, Literature and Communication, University of Valladolid

M.Ed. in Teacher Training, University of Zaragoza

M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language, Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo–Instituto Cervantes

M.Phil. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures, The Graduate Center, CUNY

B.A. in Spanish Philology, University of Zaragoza

Publications

“Dubbing a Discipline: The Emergence of Sigma Delta Pi in the U.S. Academic Field of Spanish Studies, 1919–1930.” Accepted for publication in Revista Hispánica Moderna, 79.2 (December), 2026.

“Una edición fundacional: los Estudios sobre el español de Nuevo Méjico de Aurelio M. Espinosa (1930) en el proyecto de Amado Alonso para la Biblioteca de Dialectología Hispanoamericana.” Boletín de Filología, 61(1), 2026.

“Cuervo literato y filólogo: guardián de la palabra y de la elite letrada colombiana.” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, Issue 2, 2026.

“‘The National Need of Spanish’: valor y enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera en Estados Unidos a comienzos de siglo XX.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 71(1), 2023.

“Brevísima relación de la fundación de la American Association of Teachers of Spanish (1915–1917) y su revista Hispania (1917).” Hispania: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese 102(1), 2019.