Sofia Lago is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in history from the University of Bristol 2022. Previously, she was an adjunct assistant professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her current research considers connections between cultural perception of the natural world and the creation of Self/Other identities in the nineteenth century. Her PhD was an imperial history that examines the many angles in which a hegemonic power could use folklore studies, a nineteenth-century intersection of professionalised science and the scientification of culture—an academic borderspace—as a mechanism to impose a borderland identity onto another people under the social and political oppression of others.
Select Publications
Lago, Sofia. “‘Fairy Tales’ Necessary and Natural Division into Parts: Translated Collections of Slavic Fairy Tales and the Borderland.” Journal für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, Special Issue 6, Anti-Eastern European Racism: Surveying a New Field of Research. Forthcoming 2025.
Lago, Sofia. “Wild Places and Glass Cases: Un/tamed Landscapes, Museum Exhibitions, and Identity Creation in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Routledge Companion to Cultural Texts and the Nation (New York: Routledge). Forthcoming.
Lago, Sofia. “‘Nearest Approach to Fairyland’: Mythologising Scotland in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh Periodical Travel Writing and Tourism Advertisements.” Victorian Periodicals Review. Spring 2023.
Education
PhD, History
University of Bristol, 2022MA, Museum Studies
Instituto Lorenzo de Medici, 2018BA, History and Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Stockton University, 2016
Research Interests
- Environmental History
- History of Science
- British Imperialism
- Museum Studies
- Folklore