Samuel Amago is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he serves as chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He is a former chair of the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from 2003 to 2010 he taught at the University of Notre Dame. Together with colleagues at UVA, he is currently working to launch the Global Spanish Initiative, which aims to be a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research and creative collaboration that includes all places where Spanish is or has been spoken, across the Americas, Spain, the Philippines, North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and beyond.

Sam teaches courses on modern and contemporary Spanish literary history, cinema, comics, and culture. His most recent book is Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain, which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. 

He is a native of Madrid, Spain, and grew up in Pasadena, California.