Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda Lamas (1974) is Professor of Linguistics, Translation and Communication in Spanish at the University of Heidelberg, corresponding member of the Academia Cubana de la Lengua and honorary professor at the Universidad del Pacífico (Peru).
From 1992 to 1997, he studied Hispanic Philology at the Universidade A Coruña, graduating with distinction (Premio Extraordinario). In 2001, he defended his doctoral thesis entitled Análisis de las estructuras lexemáticas del metalenguaje de la lengua. Los nombres de los tipos de texto en el español actual. From 2001 to 2008 he worked as a lecturer at the Universidade A Coruña. From 2005 to 2007, he received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his research work at the University of Tübingen. Since 2008, he has been a professor at the Chair of Spanish Translation at Heidelberg University, where he headed the Institute for Translation and Interpreting (2010-2014) and the Centro de Estudos Galegos (since 2011). In 2011, he founded the Center for Ibero-American Studies, now the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS), of which he was Deputy Director from 2019 to 2023. He is a visiting professor at the Universidad de Panamá, the Universidad de Cádiz and the Universidad de Granada. He was Vice President of the German Hispanic Studies Association from 2011 to 2015 and its President from 2015 to 2019.
He is deputy editor of the Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana and a member of the scientific committee of journals such as the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, Revista del Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Española-RILCE, Normas, Signos, Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante-ELUA or Spanish in Context, among others.
His research focuses on communication and discourse. In addition to international research projects on experimental pragmatics, he has also conducted studies on semantics, phraseology, text grammar and the social aspects of Spanish, in particular Spanish as a language of migration and origin. He has supervised more than a dozen doctoral theses in these research areas and published around thirty monographs as author or editor.
His work in the field of quality development and assurance with agencies in Spain, Chile, Austria, Switzerland and Germany is significant. From 2013 to 2019, he was Vice-Rector for Development and Quality at Heidelberg University. He is currently a member of the Accreditation Council in Germany (since 2019) and the Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation in Austria. He has played an advisory and evaluative role in quality assurance programmes and has advised various international organizations, particularly in Ibero-America.