About the Department

The Department of Hispanic Studies has its origins in 1776, when the first university department of Spanish and Italian in Great Britain and Ireland was set up. The first sole Chair of Spanish was established in 1926 and the department has enjoyed great prestige in Hispanism at international level.   

One of the largest constituent units of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, the Department is a lively teaching and research community with a strong record of scholarly activity, undergraduate teaching, and postgraduate teaching and supervision. Our present student numbers include approximately 400 undergraduates pursuing one of five degrees: Joint Honours Degree (Spanish combined with one of 17 other subjects –Ancient History and Archaeology; Classical Civilisation; Drama Studies; Economics; English Literature; Film; French; German; History; History of Art and Architecture; Italian; Linguistics; Mathematics; Middle Eastern, Jewish and Islamic Civilisations; Music; Russian; and Sociology); Business Studies and a Language; European Studies; Middle Eastern and European Languages and Cultures; and Computer Science, Linguistics and a Language. In addition, students in Business, Economics and Social Sciences (BESS), and Law and Business are offered a Spanish option, and Spanish will be a participant in a new B.Ed. programme being proposed for Post-primary education led by the School of Education.  

The Department contributes to several graduate M.Phil. degree programmes, and offers Ph.D. supervision across all areas of expertise of the academic members of staff with teaching and research contracts, spanning a wide range of topics in literary and cultural studies (from the Spanish medieval period to the twenty-first century), translation, linguistics, and Latin American literature, society, culture and film. See Department Staff pages for details of current expertise. Staff members work closely with the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and other Trinity partners (such as the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation). The Department maintains international links with several partner universities in Spain, as well as with embassies and Spanish cultural organisations in Ireland, and for Latin America it is a full member of CASA [Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad]:   
 https://www.tcd.ie/Hispanic_Studies/undergraduate/study-abroad/casa.php  
 https://casa.education/dublin  
   
Academic staff are actively involved in the School’s and Faculty’s research hubs (Centre for European Studies; Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation; Centre for Resistance Studies, launched in 2021; the Centre for Forced Migration Studies, launched in 2022; Trinity Centre for the Book, launched in 2023; and the HCI Centre for Global Intercultural Communications) and also collaborate with the College Research Themes, in particular with Identities in Transformation.   

Spanish can be studied in different Undergraduate and Postgraduate degrees

For the latest Prospectuses, please click here