AAHHE Sylvia Hurtado University Faculty Award

The AAHHE Sylvia Hurtado University Faculty Award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated excellence in both research and teaching and has provided significant contributions to their respective academic disciplines. The AAHHE University Faculty is now named for Dr. Sylvia Hurtado. You may see Dr. Hurtado's biography and photo here. 

2023 AAHHE Sylvia Hurtado University Faculty Award Recipients

University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Gina Ann Garcia is an associate professor in the department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research centers on issues of equity and justice in higher education with an emphasis on understanding how Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) enact an organizational identity for serving minoritized populations. She also seeks to understand the experiences of administrators, faculty, and staff within HSIs and the outcomes and experiences of students attending these institutions. Dr. Garcia is the author of Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges & Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) for which she won the AAHHE Book of the Year Award in 2020 and the editor of Hispanic-Serving Institutions in Practice: Defining “Servingness” at HSIs (Information Age Publishing, 2020). She has delivered over 125 public lectures and workshops at HSIs across the country and consults directly with HSIs to work towards organizational transformation (www.ginaanngarcia.com). Dr. Garcia is a proud alumna of an HSI, California State University, Northridge, and holds a master’s degree from the University of Maryland. Her PhD is in higher education and organizational change from UCLA. She was a Title V Coordinator at CSUF which drives and motivates her research and praxis.

Gilberto Rosas, PhD
Interim Chair of Latina/Latino Studies
Associate Professor
Departments of Anthropology and Latina/Latino Studies
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Gilberto Rosas is the Conrad Humanities Fellow for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2020-25), an Associate Professor in the Departments of Latina/Latino Studies and Anthropology, and the Interim Chair of Latina/Latino Studies, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also affiliated with the Center for Institute for Genomic Biology and the Unit for Criticism and Social Theory.

His expertise includes critical border and immigration, studies, criminality, race and its intersections, and increasingly racial capitalism and settler colonialism. He is author of the award-winning book, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Duke, 2012), and related scholarship on the thickening US-Mexico borderlands. His soon to be released Unsettling: the El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border (Johns Hopkins, 2023) analyzes the mass shooting of August 3, 2019, family separation, and migrant detention, drawing on eyewitness accounts and the work of advocates, in his hometown.

Rosas lives in Champaign, Illinois, with his partner, children, and nonhuman companions.

List of past recipients of the AAHHE University Faculty Award: