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Parvati Nair is Professor of Hispanic Cultural Studies at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London.

Born in Oslo in 1961 to Indian parents, she lived in Norway, India, Poland, Morocco, Tunisia and Spain before coming to London.

In 1978, she arrived to begin her degree at Westfield College in Spanish with subsidiary French. Coming as she did to London as a foreign student, she felt privileged to find herself in a College as welcoming and beautiful as Westfield. Already taken by the vibrancy of the Spanish language and culture and enthused by the quality of the teaching that she encountered in the Spanish Department, Nair very much enjoyed her undergraduate years and made the decision early on to pursue a career in Hispanism.

Her first step towards making this happen was through an MA in the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literature at the Institute of Education at the University of London in 1993. She began her teaching career as Lecturer in Spanish at Thames Valley University, moving later on to London Guildhall University , where she remained until 2000.

Between 1996 and 2001, she completed her doctorate in Spanish cultural studies under the direction of Professor Jo Labanyi at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her thesis, later published as a book, relied upon an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the concept of community as represented in diverse cultural texts following the transition to democracy in Spain.

In September 2000, Nair joined the School of Modern Languages at QMUL. The courses she teaches at undergraduate level focus on nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish literature and on visual culture, namely on gender in Spanish cinema and on photography of the Spanish civil war and of the period of dictatorship. At Masters level, she teaches courses on film, migration and cultural memory. Nair's early post-doctoral research dwelt on cultural representations of migration across the Straits of Gibraltar, from North Africa to Spain. This involved, in particular, a special focus on photography of displacement and minority groups.

Nair's current research project, a book on the photography of Sebastião Salgado, grew from writing the book that resulted from this earlier project. Her current book encompasses questions of photographic representation at local as well as global and theoretical levels. Future research plans include a collaborative project on women filmmakers and a book on photography and cultural memory of the Spanish Second Republic in Andalusia, as well as further work on photography and migration.

Nair is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Associate Fellow of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies and of the Institute for the Study of the Americas. She serves on the editorial board of several refereed journals, publishes widely and speaks internationally. She is one of a handful of South Asian Hispanists. Her work is eclectic, often exceeding the culturally specific to interrogate theories that can be applied across contexts, reflecting the diversity of her personal background and intellectual interests.

She finds in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film a warm and receptive environment, with colleagues and students who are both supportive and engaging. When not in London, Nair is most often in Granada, whose rich history of ethnic diversity and superb cultural production across the ages opens windows onto so many issues that are pertinent to her chosen field of Hispanic Cultural Studies.