Smithsonian Journeys Experts

David T. Gies is Commonwealth Professor of Spanish Emeritus at the University of Virginia and former Chair of his Department. He has published seventeen books, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (1999), Theatre and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Juan de Grimaldi as Impresario and Government Agent (Cambridge, 1988), The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1994), The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (2004), The Cambridge History of Theatre in Spain (co-edited, 2012), Eros y amistad (2016), and The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment (co-edited, 2017). Author of more than 120 scholarly and 140 book reviews, he edits DIECIOCHO, a journal dedicated to the study of the Spanish Enlightenment, now in its 42nd year.

He has received the University of Virginia Outstanding Teaching Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and, in 2007, was named Encomienda de Número de la Orden de Isabel la Católica, a knighthood granted by His Majesty Juan Carlos, King of Spain.

In July 2013, he was elected for a three-year term as President of the International Association of Hispanists, the world's largest professional organization of Spanish scholars, and in September 2015, he was elected Honorary President of Sigma Delta Pi, the Spanish National Honorary Society.

In 2016, he won the prestigious annual Anderson Imbert Prize from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and was named Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid. In 2019 he joined the Board of the Fundación Duques de Soria.