Sam Amago
I teach courses on modern and contemporary Spanish literary history, cinema, comics, and culture. From 2019-2022, I served as Chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at UVA. I am a former Chair of the Department of Romance Studies and Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2003 to 2010 I taught at the University of Notre Dame, where I served as Associate Professor of Spanish. In an administrative capacity, I was a fellow in the University of Virginia's Leadership in Academic Matters Program (2021) and the Chairs Leadership Program at UNC-Chapel Hill (2018).
My current scholarship centers on waste and space, memory and modernity in post-dictatorship Spanish cultural production, including photography, documentary, narrative, comics, film and television.
Click here to read a short entry on basura / trash / waste, which is part of the collective Constellation of the Commons.
Click here to listen to a podcast on trash, aesthetics, and Spanish film of the post-Franco era.
PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
Amago, Samuel. Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain. University of Virginia Press, 2021.
Amago, Samuel. Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film. Routledge, 2013.
Amago, Samuel. True Lies: Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel. Bucknell University Press, 2006.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
Amago, Samuel. “Waste and Space in Contemporary Spain: Photographic Archaeologies of the Anthropocene”. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 23, 2019, pp. 145-6, https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/48636573.
Book Chapters:
Amago, Samuel. “Cartografía fotográfica de periferia, cinturón, extrarradio”. Cartografías in/Justas: Representaciones Culturales del Espacio Urbano Y Rural en la España Contemporánea, edited by Mónica López Lerma, Comares, 2024, pp. 95-113.
Amago, Samuel. “Aesthetics and the Political Ecology of Spanish Waste Space”. A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, edited by Luis Iñaki Prádanos, Tamesis, 2022, pp. 254-62.