Joanna Brooks is a scholar of American belonging, an author, and a long-serving public university administrator.
Her service in academic-administrative roles since 2009 has spanned academic planning, programs, and personnel, undergraduate and graduate student success, and leadership development. As the Associate Vice President for Faculty Advancement and Student Success at San Diego State University, she has led campus-wide initiatives to improve undergraduate retention and graduation rates and build SDSU’s R1 caliber faculty. She is co-founder of SDSU’s Digital Humanities Center and has partnered with the National Humanities Center to train hundreds of humanities faculty and graduate students nationwide in public-facing digital modalities and to conduct strategic conversations about humanities futures with top university leaders.
Her creative and scholarly work seeks to understand catastrophes of belonging–moments of radical change, displacement, estrangement, and violence–and how American communities respond by piecing themselves together. 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.