Brief curriculum vitae
María José López Couso holds a degree in Germanic Philology (English) and a PhD in English Philology from the University Santiago de Compostela, where in 1988 she joined the English and German Philology Department as a scholarship holder of the Teacher and Research Staff Training Programme (FPI) of the Ministry of Education and Science and where she later held positions as Associate Professor, Interim Professor and University Professor. Since february 2023 she is a Tenured University Professors.
Member of the Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization research group, her research activity is encompassed in the areas of variation and linguistic change in the English language, particularly in processes of grammaticalization, constructionalization, subjectivization and intersubjectivization.
In the field of university management, she has held the positions of Vice-chancellor for Degrees and Internationalization (2020-2022), Dean of the Faculty of Philology (2012-2020), where she was also Vice-Dean (2008-2012) and Academic Responsible for Mobility (2002-2004), President of the College of Deans and Centre Directors of the USC (2014-2019) and member of the Standing Committee of the Association for the Conference of Deans of University Centres with Degrees in Arts and Humanities (ADEAH). She was also a member of the Coordination Committee of the Campus of Citizenship and of the Academic Editorial Committee of the Publications and Scientific Exchange Department of the USC. She has also held positions of responsibility in several international associations in the field of linguistics, among others ICAME (International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English), to whose Executive Committee she belonged between 2009 and 2017.
Member of assessment committees of different national (ANEP, AVAP, AQU) and international (FWO, NWO) agencies and on editorial boards of several scientific journals, in recent years she has also undertaken intensive work on a programme to train junior researchers, by directing ten PhD theses, more than thirty degree dissertation projects, tutored research projects and Master's degree theses, and the tutoring and supervision of several pre-doctoral students recruited in regional and state programmes (FPU, FPI).