Gabriela Garcia is the Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. In this role, Dr. Garcia works with the Faculty Council to develop collaborative research initiatives, advance interdisciplinary graduate training and drive public engagement with the liberal arts at Rice.

Dr. Garcia is an intercultural communication scholar whose research and teaching focus on the ways that cross-cultural interactions shape our conceptions of productivity and idleness and their effects on the relationship between humans and nature.

Her current book project, The Dialectic of Comodismo: Brazil in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Western Cultural Imaginary, examines the relationship between the human and the natural environment in Brazil by theorizing the figure of the acomodado, a Brazilian social type usually characterized as lethargic, complacent and accommodating. While comodismo is derided in everyday discourses in Brazil, Dr. Garcia’s work analyzes transnational exchanges between North Americans, Western Europeans and Brazilians to show how this mode of Brazilian subjectivity is a potential resource for thinking through a balanced kind of relationality between humans, nature and modes of production, an urgent task given our current environmental crisis.

Dr. Garcia comes to Rice from Tulane University, where she helped launch the Tulane Global Humanities Research Center and produced the Anti-Racism and the Disciplines podcast. She also brings to Rice extensive experience in academic programming, having organized over 60 conferences and symposia in the U.S. and Europe.