Cordelia Candelaria

Why Is Cordelia Candelaria Influential?

According to Wikipedia, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria is an American educator and writer of Hispanic descent. The daughter of Ray J. Chávez and Eloida Trujillo, she was born in Deming, New Mexico and studied English and French at Fort Lewis College. She next received an MA in English and a PhD in American literature and structural linguistics from the University of Notre Dame. From 1975 to 1978, Candelaria was associate professor of English and Chicano literature at Idaho State University. She was program officer for the Division of Research at the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1976 to 1977. From 1978 to 1991, she was an associate professor of English and head of the Chicano Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder; she was also founding director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in America there. In 1991, she became an American literature professor and research associate at the Hispanic Research Center of Arizona State University. From 2001 to 2005, she was chair of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. In 2008, she was named dean of the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University; she resigned from the position of dean in May the following year "for personal reasons".