As Director of Graduate Initiatives and Innovation in the School of Humanities and Arts, Gabriela Garcia works closely with the school's leadership and faculty, as well as with national, peer and local partners to reimagine graduate education in the humanities at Rice and beyond. In this capacity, she advances innovative training for graduate students, directs the Public Humanities Graduate Internship Program, and designs curricula that support holistic humanistic education, including developing students’ institutional literacy, engaging them with critical university studies and public humanities, and preparing them for diverse career paths.
As Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center, Garcia works with the center's director and Faculty Council to facilitate interdisciplinary humanities research, advance innovative postdoctoral programs and drive public engagement with the liberal arts. Her work bridges the HRC’s history of research excellence with an expanding network of partners that create local impact and foster global dialogue, raising the school’s visibility and influence in key areas of humanistic inquiry and artistic practice.
She is a poet and essayist whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Inside Higher Ed, AGNI, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, The Acentos Review, Chiricú Journal, and elsewhere. On LinkedIn, she writes regularly on PhD reform, the humanities and how universities actually work.
Garcia brings extensive experience in academic programming, institution building and public engagement, having organized more than 60 conferences and symposia across the U.S. and Europe. Before joining Rice, she helped launch the Tulane Global Humanities Center and produced the Anti-Racism and the Disciplines podcast. She also served as Research Associate and Director of Communications for the Center for Transcultural Studies and held multiple roles at various centers and institutes at Northwestern University.
Garcia holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, where she received the Best Graduate Dissertation Award and completed a graduate certificate in Critical Theory.