Since January 2023, Dr. Ivonne M. García has been Assistant Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Williams College.
Prior to Williams, in April 2022 Dr. García became the inaugural Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty and Staff Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She joined HGSE in June 2021 as the first Senior Instructional Coach for Anti-Racist Pedagogy, as part of that institution’s Anti-Racist Teaching and Advising initiative, and in October 2021 was appointed as Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Dr. García designs and leads antibias and antiracism workshops, and has offered them virtually at The College of Wooster, Kenyon College, Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Engineering, and The Graduate Mentoring Center of the University of Indiana Bloomington’s Graduate School, among others.
From January 2019 to May 2021, she served as the first Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer at The College of Wooster. Reporting to then-President Sarah R. Bolton, she was responsible for leading the college’s efforts to realize its commitments to become more diverse, and to create a truly welcoming, equitable, and inclusive campus culture. In that capacity, she also served on the Five Colleges of Ohio Diversity Deans and Officers Committee, as part of the larger Ohio Five Academic Mission Committee. Her work included designing and implementing a faculty mentoring program; instituting a program of equity advisers for all faculty and many staff searches; developing a policy and process for reporting incidents of bias; and, working with faculty to mandate antiracism and antibias training for all academic departments and programs.
(photo by Daniela Hernández, HGSE Ed.M. ’22)
Prior to joining The College of Wooster, Dr. García was the William P. Rice Associate Professor of English and Literature at Kenyon College, specializing in nineteenth-century multi-ethnic U.S. literature, postcolonial, and Latinx studies. Her teaching and research are interdisciplinary and mainly influenced by frameworks of discourse analysis, including transhemispheric, transcolonial, and post-nationalist approaches. In 2019, Dr. García’s book on Gothic Geocultures: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the TransAmerican Imaginary was published by The Ohio State University Press.
During her 13 years at Kenyon, Dr. García won several awards for her teaching, including the Trustee Teaching Excellence Award, created by the Kenyon Board of Trustees to recognize faculty members for “exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship.” She was awarded tenure by Kenyon in 2013, and in July 2014 was appointed as Kenyon’s first Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as part of then-President Sean Decatur’s historic initiative to create the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In July 2015, she was promoted to Associate Provost for Faculty Development and worked in the Provost’s Office until June 2017.
Before completing her doctoral studies at The Ohio State University, Dr. García was an award-winning newspaper and new media journalist and editor in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with her writer/editor husband and their rescued furry children (two cats and a Chihuahua).