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David Knutson is a native of Iowa. He began studying Spanish in high school and was a Spanish major at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. While in college, he spent his junior year at the Universidad de Granada in Spain. After completing his bachelor’s degree at Hamline, he served as a VISTA volunteer with literacy and English-as-Second-Language programs in the Twin Cities before beginning graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Dr. Knutson taught for two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, IA, and became a Xavier faculty member in August, 1994.

While at Xavier, he has accompanied groups of students to Nicaragua, Mexico, and Spain, and he has served on the Academic Computing Committee, the Committee on Public Honors, the Diversity Advisory Council, Board of Undergraduate Studies, Pilot Core Curriculum Committee, and the Faculty Committee. He served as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages from 2006 to 2012. During the 2007-08 academic year, he participated in the first cohort of the Xavier Leadership Academy.

Dr. Knutson lived in Madrid during the 2003-04 academic year as a visiting professor with the University Studies Abroad Consortium (USAC) in the fall semester and on a research sabbatical in the spring. He also worked as a USAC visiting professor in Alicante during July sessions in 2011 and 2012.  In addition to his scholarship on the Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza, he has published articles and given presentations on numerous topics relating to 19th- and 20th-Century Spanish literature.