Faculty Director
Miroslava Chávez-García is the Faculty Director of the McNair Scholars Program and a Professor of History at UCSB who has affiliated appointments with the Departments of Feminist Studies and Chicana/o Studies and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She is the author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson, 2004), States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012), and most recently, her award-winning Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2018). Dr. Chávez-García served from 2016 to 2019 as Faculty Director for Graduate Diversity Initiatives, overseeing the Graduate Scholars Program, designed to retain, mentor, and matriculate first- and second-year students. She also served as a member of the UCSB Academic Senate committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. From 2013 to 2015, she served as interim Chair and Vice Chair for UCSB’s Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. While at UC Davis, her previous place of employment, she was a member of the Chicana/Latina Research Center steering committee and chaired the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC Davis.