Faculty and graduate students in Spanish, Italian & Portuguese study the languages, literatures, and cultures of a world that spans four continents and a thousand years. Our work moves across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary film, and from the mechanics of a single sound change to the politics of global solidarity movements.
A department without a single center
Spanish, Italian & Portuguese is unusual among language departments in its range. We are not organized around one national tradition. Our faculty work in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Mediterranean, and the U.S. Latinx world — and increasingly on the connections between them.
That breadth shapes how we do research. Projects here tend to cross borders: between languages, between periods, and between the humanities and other disciplines. A study of environmental writing in Italy sits alongside work on Afro-descendant political movements in the Americas; a history of Spanish sound change sits alongside research on how students actually acquire the language today.
What we study
Six broad currents run through our work. Each links to the faculty working in that area.
Empire, Race & Global Solidarities
Colonialism and its afterlives across the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds; South–South political and cultural movements; Afro-descendant and Indigenous histories; the transnational networks connecting Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States.
Literature & the Life of Genre
Poetry, theater, and the novel from the medieval period to the present. Close attention to form, to the history of the book, and to how genres travel and change across languages and centuries.
Film, Media & Visual Culture
Brazilian television and cinema, Spanish film, contemporary visual art, and the media industries that shape how the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds see themselves and are seen.
Hispanic & Romance Linguistics
The structure and history of Spanish and the Romance languages: phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and the documented record of how these languages changed over time.
Language Acquisition & Pedagogy
How learners acquire a second language, how programs should be designed to support them, and how teachers are prepared. Research here feeds directly back into our classrooms and placement practices.
Environment, Gender & the Everyday
Ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; food, embodiment, and gender in Italian and Hispanic cultures; the study of daily life as a serious object of humanistic inquiry.
Centers, projects & initiatives
Global South Studies
A digital publication and research platform founded and directed by Associate Professor Anne Garland Mahler, Global South Studies has been central to the growth of Global South studies as an interdisciplinary field. It publishes scholarly essays, keyword entries, and resources used by researchers worldwide.
Latin American Studies Program
The interdisciplinary Latin American Studies major and minor, directed from within our department, draws on courses from more than a dozen units across the University.
Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship in Caribbean Literatures, Arts & Cultures
A University-wide fellowship co-coordinated by our faculty, supporting doctoral research on the Caribbean across departments.
Casa Bolívar
The department’s residential and cultural hub for Spanish-language life at UVA, and a site for public programming that brings research to a broader audience. Visit Casa Bolívar.
UVA in Valencia & UVA in Siena
Our study abroad programs are also research sites. Faculty directors maintain long-standing scholarly and institutional relationships in Spain and Italy that support fieldwork, archival access, and collaboration with European colleagues.
Find a researcher
Our faculty directory can be filtered by subject, world region, and time period — useful whether you’re a prospective graduate student looking for an adviser, a journalist seeking expert comment, or a colleague looking for a collaborator.
Graduate research
Doctoral students in Spanish are full participants in the department’s research life, not apprentices waiting their turn. They present at national conferences, publish in peer-reviewed journals, curate public programming, and work alongside faculty on funded projects. Dissertations from this department have gone on to become books with major academic presses.