Dr Irene Macías, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Chartered Linguist, graduated from King’s College, London, where she obtained her degree and her doctorate.

She lectures and researches on Applied Linguistics, Spanish as a Foreign Language and Contemporary Spain; she is particularly interested in the intersection of culture and language teaching & learning, and she is currently working on decolonization. She convenes the final year modules El mundo hispanohablante en textos (PL31004) and Language, Power and Society (PL30971). She also lectures on contemporary topics in Spanish Linguistics within the ab-initio modules PL12019 and PL21027.

She heads up the Hispanics Section in the Department. She is also a very active member of the Learning and Teaching community at Bath. She collaborates with the Centre for Learning & Teaching as Advisor and Senior Observer for its HEA accredited Fellowship programme. She has taken on a number of roles in the Department; most recently, she has been  Director of Studies for the International Management and Modern Languages degree programme. 

Amongst her external projects, she is a member of the ELEUK SIG working on decolonisation. She is the Co-founder and Co-Director of LanGW4 , a languages consortium whose aim is to advance scholarship on language learning and teaching. The consortium brings together the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter and organizes annual Colloquiums on Innovation in Modern Languages Education.

Other key projects include the EU funded CO-CREATION: The Cohesive City: Addressing Stigmatisation in Disadvantaged Urban Neighbourhoods. The project aimed to develop and apply ‘Co-Creation’ as a methodological tool to address stigmatisation. Her involvement entailed working with socially disadvantage school communities in Mexico City.

She served on the national panel set up to review A Level language content, ALCAB. She sat on the editorial board of Vida Hispanica, of the Association for Language Learning until 2016. She  is a UNILANG certified assessor.