In January 2023, Dr. Ivonne M. García was appointed Assistant Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Williams College. In July 2024, she was named Director of Pathways of Inclusive Excellence, which oversees the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows, the Allison Davis Undergraduate Fellows, the Summer Science Program, and the Summer Humanities and Social Science Program.
Before Williams, Dr. García was 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. She became director in April 2022.
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 led the college’s efforts to realize its commitment to becoming more diverse and creating 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 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 anti-bias training for all academic departments and programs.
(photo by Daniela Hernández, HGSE Ed.M. ’22)
Before 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 trans-hemispheric, trans-colonial, 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, established by the Kenyon Board of Trustees to recognize faculty members for “exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship.” She received tenure 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 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).