Gabriela Garcia is a scholar of critical university studies, a writer and a leader in graduate education. At Rice, she directs initiatives that reimagine humanities PhD education and teaches graduate students how universities work.

As Director of Graduate Initiatives and Innovation in the School of Humanities and Arts, Garcia co-leads the school’s work with the American Council of Learned Societies on redesigning the PhD and founded and directs the Public Humanities Graduate Internship Program. She designed and teaches an original graduate course sequence that makes the university itself an object of humanistic study, preparing graduate students to lead within institutions and beyond them.

As Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center, she leads a team that includes staff, postdoctoral associates, graduate associates and undergraduate interns. She oversees the center’s fellowship and grant programs, is co-principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “Writing History, Righting Democracy,” and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Garcia coined the framework of institutional literacy: the knowledge of how universities actually run that PhD programs rarely teach. Her writing on it has been taken up by educators and administrators across the country, and she speaks nationally on how universities work and the future of graduate education. Her book on the subject is under contract with the University of Chicago Press and expected in 2028 under the name Gabriela Mayes.

Garcia’s poetry, creative nonfiction and public scholarship appear in AGNI, Inside Higher Ed, The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere, and her poem “How to Pick Guava” was selected for Best New Poets 2026.

She has organized more than 60 conferences and symposia across the U.S. and Europe. Before Rice, she was on the founding team of the Tulane Global Humanities Center. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University.