Dr. Nichols is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida. She was Chair of the department between 1994-2003. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.  Her research over the past twenty-five years has centered on contemporary women’s narrative in Spain, especially in Catalonia. She is on three editorial boards for journals in the field of Spanish literature, and has served as an elected member of the Executive Committee of the MLA’s Twentieth Century Spanish Literature Division (1996-2000; President, 2000) and of the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (2000-02; President, 2002). She created the highly successful Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum program at UF in 1996 as co-P.I. on a Title VI A grant for that purpose. Current research interests are the imbrication of nationalism, gender, and subjectivity in pre- and postwar narrative by women in Catalonia, the representation of reproduction in fiction in twentieth-century Spain, and the role of memory in the construction of contemporary Spanish identity.