Marisela Chávez

Marisela R. Chávez, Ph.D., Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, teaches and researches Chicana/o/x history, politics, and identity; Chicana and women of color feminisms; U.S. social movements; oral history and memory; and Latino/a/x immigration. As a valued CSUDH faculty member since 2005, Dr. Chávez has served the campus in various capacities. From 2015 -2020, she chaired the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department. As evidence of her excellence in teaching and mentorship of students, Dr. Chávez was awarded the Lyle E. Gibson Distinguished Teacher Award at CSUDH in 2016. In 2014, she was appointed as one of only two Academic Affairs Administrative Fellows, directing CSUDH’s high-impact practices initiative. She coordinated the campus’s first High-Impact Practices Symposium and subsequently co-chaired the inaugural Faculty Learning Communities Advisory Board, supporting the implementation of high-impact practices for over 50 faculty members.

Active in service to the university and to her discipline, Dr. Chávez has served on the HIPs Assessment Committee, the General Education Assessment Working Group, the General Education Committee, and the University Writing Committee, and numerous other campus committees. Dr. Chávez has also been a member of the preliminary selection committee for the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies since 2013. Additionally, she has served as a member of the National Advisory Board for Chicana Por Mi Raza: Uncovering the Hidden History of Chicana Feminism (an NEH Digital Humanities Project), a reviewer for various journals, and a member of the selection committee for the Lerner-Scott Prize of the Organization of American Historians.

Dr. Chavez’s recent publications include “Rooted in Community: Chicana Political Leadership in the United States, a Look at Scholarship and Activism,” in Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); “Triunfos y Tribulaciones/Triumphs and Challenges: An Intersectional Discussion on Chicana Leadership in the Academy,” a co-authored piece in The Tenure-Track Process for Chicana and Latina Faculty: Experiences of Resisting and Persisting in the Academy (Routledge, 2019); and “Refocusing Chicana International Feminism: Photographs, Postmemory, and Political Trauma,” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (University of Texas Press, 2018). She is currently revising a book manuscript that traces Chicana and Mexican American women’s activism in Los Angeles from the late 1950s to 1980.