Nicolas Shumway, Ph.D.

Nicolas Shumway received a doctoral degree in Hispanic Literature from UCLA in 1976. For fourteen years, he taught at Yale University, where he attained the rank of full professor. In 1993, he was appointed Tomás Rivera Regents Professor of Spanish American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Between 1995 and 2007, he directed UT’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. In 2010, he was appointed Dean of Humanities at Rice University, a position he held for seven years. He is now retired. He has held visiting appointments at the University of São Paulo and at two Argentine universities, the University of San Andrés and the University Torcuato di Tella. His 1991 book, The Invention of Argentina, won international recognition and was selected by The New York Times as “a notable book of the year.” In 1993, Emecé Editores published a Spanish translation of the book in Argentina and a revised edition in 2002. The USP Press published a Portuguese translation of the book in 2009. In 2012, Emecé published his second book on Argentina, Historia personal de una pasión argentina, which includes an autobiographical essay contextualizing his work on Argentina as well as a study of how the term liberalism has been used in Argentine political discourse. He is currently the Frances Moody Newman Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Rice University. He continues to lecture at special events and in continuing education programs. Most recently, he gave the keynote address on humanities in the digital age for the Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA) at the University of São Paulo.