Paula Covington

Paula Covington (email)

Latin American Librarian, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies (M.A.,  Vanderbilt University, 1994; M.L.S., Vanderbilt University, 1971). Paula Covington is the Latin American and Iberian Librarian at the Vanderbilt University Libraries and a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies. She has taught Latin American Research Methods for more than three decades, and is the author of an award-winning work, Latin America and the Caribbean: A Research Guide, a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Covington is past president of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), an international organization focused on the development of research services and library collections of Latin Americana. She has twice received the José Toribio Medina award for a distinguished monograph in Latin American Studies. Covington received her degrees from Syracuse University and Vanderbilt University in Latin American history and studied at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a participant in an NEH-funded project to preserve and digitize colonial Latin American slave society records (Slave Societies Digital Archive). Her principal research interest is 19th-century women travelers to Latin America.

Covington is actively engaged in several grants to make the university’s Afro-Colombian Manuel and Delia Zapata Olivella collections accessible worldwide and co-hosted a conference to celebrate the centenary of Manuel Zapata Olivella in 2021.