Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs
Deena J. González is a native of New Mexico (14th generation) who left the land of her birth after completing her undergraduate degree. At UC, Berkeley she received her Ph.D. in history in 1985, the first Chicana to finish its doctoral program. In 1983, she was instructor at Pomona College, and assistant professor (1985-1991). She chaired the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Studies at the Claremont Colleges and directed the Women’s Studies Program until she left her position in 2001 to become chair of the Department of Chicana/o Studies at LMU. In her first years in the professoriate, she helped establish a national Chicana academic organization, MALCS, and she served on such important committees as the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians. Her first book, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 was published by Oxford University Press and she has authored over fifty articles and book chapters, plus a major reference work on Latinos in the U.S., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. In 2010-11, after serving as a department chair for eight years, she received an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellowship designed to prepare senior leaders of institutions of higher learning for advanced positions. Upon returning to LMU, she was appointed Director of Faculty Development (2011-12) and in the summer, 2012, she was named Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. She is currently co-editing another Oxford University Press reference work as well as her own manuscript on New Mexican women’s wills and testaments. She was recently appointed to the founding board of a new journal, The Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color.