Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Samuel Amago (Ph.D. University of Virginia) teaches courses on modern and contemporary Spanish literary history, cinema, and culture at the University of Virginia. He has served as Chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at UVA and, previously, of the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2003 to 2010 he taught at the University of Notre Dame. His current scholarship centers on waste and space, memory and modernity in post-dictatorship Spanish culture, with a focus on photography, documentary, literature, comics, film and television. He is a native of Madrid, Spain, and grew up in Pasadena, California.