Joanna Brooks is a scholar of American catastrophes of belonging, an advocate for the humanities, and a long-serving public university administrator. As the Associate Vice President for Faculty Advancement and Student Success at San Diego State University, a large, public, diversity-comitted R1-aspirant university, she has extensive experience in organizing and implementing institution-wide initiatives in student success, strategic planning, and faculty recruitment, retention, and support.
Her service in academic-administrative roles since 2009 has spanned academic planning, programs, and personnel, equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, complex personnel issues, labor relations, student advocacy and support, graduate admissions and enrollments, academic partnerships and initiatives, and leadership development. She has developed parternships with or served on advisory boards for the National Humanities Center, Interfolio by Elsevier, Finsiteful, APLU’s Faculty Affairs Committee, and SDSU’s NIH-funded Health Link initiative. She is among the founders of SDSU’s Digital Humanities program and the Initiative for Inclusive Leadership.
She is an award-winning author or editor of ten books on race, religion, gender, social movements, and American culture. She has appeared in global media outlets including the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post and helped create and lead organizations advancing the rights and well-being of people seeking asylum, LGBTQ+ families, and progressive people of faith. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is proudly fourth-generation Los Angeles-born, with deep and diverse roots in the working-class American west among communities of Basque Californios, Okies, and Mormon pioneers.