Rate My Professor Catherine Boyle

Professor Catherine Boyle is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London. She earned a BA in Modern Foreign Languages from the University of Strathclyde in 1982, followed by an MA in 1983 and a PhD in 1986 in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool, with her doctoral thesis focusing on theatre in Chile from 1973 to 1985. Boyle held her first academic post at the University of Strathclyde before joining King’s College London in 1990 in Latin American Studies. She advanced to Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies in 2007 and has served multiple terms as Head of Department, including from 1997 to 2006 and as Head of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures from 2022 to 2025. She was also Head of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies in 2010 and elected President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland from 2020 to 2024. As Director of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking, part of the Global Cultures Institute, she leads initiatives bridging language research, learning, and multilingualism.

Boyle’s research specializations encompass Chilean literature, theatre, and cultural history; Spanish American and Hispanic theatre studies; translation and cultural transmission; and gender studies, including Spanish and Latin American drama, stage translation and performance, translation of Shakespeare into Spanish, and Spanish American women’s writing by authors such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra, and Isidora Aguirre. She has served as Principal Investigator on major projects, including the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking (£3 million, 2016–2021), Out of the Wings theatre translation and performance project, Worldmaking in the Time of COVID-19, and the forthcoming Leverhulme Trust-funded Theatre Research, Translation and Performance from Chile to the UK Across Time (2025–2026). Key publications include Chilean Theater, 1973-1985: Marginality, Power and Selfhood (1992), her translation House of Desires (2004) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, co-edited The Spanish Golden Age in English: Perspectives on Performance (2007), Language Acts and Worldmaking: How and Why the Languages We Use Shape Our World and Lives (2022), and Multilingual Narratives of a Pandemic: Covid 19 and Worldmaking (2023). A co-founder and editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies since 1992, she also co-edits the Language Acts and Worldmaking book series. Boyle has received the Excellence in Innovation & Impact award (2012) and Supervisory Excellence Award (2008), with significant impact through theatre collaborations, public festivals, readings, podcasts, and e-books.