Major 2009 Anniversaries: Dr. Johnson, Darwin, Women in Medicine

Cordelia Candelaria came to SMU last July to serve as the Dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Science. Dean Candelaria came to SMU from Arizona State University in Tempe where she was Regents Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, a department she once chaired.

Throughout her career, Candelaria has remained an active teacher and researcher, receiving 18 grants from external funding agencies totaling $3.5 million—12 grants as the principal or co-principal investigator and six as a member of the research team. She is the sole author of six books and “chapbooks,” pamphlets containing poems, ballads, stories or religious tracts. Among her publications are the scholarly books Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature and Chicano Poetry, A Critical Introduction. Along with serving as executive editor of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, she has edited or co-edited 10 books, monographs and periodicals and has written nearly 200 book chapters, articles, reviews and poems in periodicals and anthologies.

Candelaria earned a B.A. degree with honors in English and French from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado; a master’s degree in English from the University of Notre Dame; and a Ph.D. degree in American literature and linguistics from Notre Dame. In 1970-72 she studied under a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship.

After beginning her academic career at Idaho State University, she served as a program officer in the Division of Research at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. There, for the first time, she integrated underrepresented disciplines and scholars into its database of specialist readers, reviewers and evaluation panels.

Candelaria also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was founding director of the UCB Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, chaired the Chicano Studies Program and taught in the Department of English. She was a visiting professor at Stanford University’s Department of English and Chicano Fellows Center.

Among numerous awards, in 2005 she received the Outstanding Latina Cultural Award in Literary Arts and Publications from the American Association for Higher Education Hispanic Caucus and in 2001 was named Scholar of the Year by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. She previously was named a Senior Fulbright Scholar in American Literature at Universidad Católica de Lima, Perú. In 1991, she became only the third recipient of The Americas Award from the University of Colorado, Boulder, following previous winners Carlos Fuentes and U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.