University of Virginia Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

Professor of Spanish and Department Chair

Research: 20th century Latin American women writers, women’s autobiography, and US Latinas.

MARÍA INÉS LAGOS is Professor of Spanish. Born in Santiago, Chile, she did her undergraduate work in Hispanic Literatures and Classics at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, and her M.A., and Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York. She has taught at The City College (CUNY), Dartmouth College, several summers at the Spanish Summer School at Middlebury College in Vermont (between 1980 and 1986), was a visiting faculty at Vassar College (Fall 1983), and from 1980 to 1988 an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton where she directed CUSH (Center for the Study of US Hispanics), 1987-88. At the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis from 1988 to 2002, she also taught courses in the Women’s Studies Program. In 1995 she started and then directed Washington University’s Study Abroad Program in Santiago, Chile; was a member of the Women’s Studies executive committee since 1992, and for ten years coordinated the Women’s Studies reading group in feminist theory (1991-2001); was president elect (1996-97) and president (1997-98) of the Association of Women Faculty in the Hilltop Campus (AWF). She joined the department in the fall of 2002. She serves in the editorial board of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Nomadías (University of Chile), and South Atlantic Modern Language Association (2008-10). Her fields of concentration are Latin American narrative, Latin American women’s fiction in the 20th century, and gender theory. She has authored and edited several books and published numerous articles.