Dr. Melita Marie Garza is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Honored several times for her contributions to the field, particularly in Hispanic journalism, Dr. Melita M. Garza researches the interactions between the news media and society. She is also the university's Tom and June Netzel Sleeman scholar in business journalism. In 2024, her essay: Ruben Salazar: Beyond Postage Stamp Memory won first place in the essay contest sponsored by the scholarly periodical Journalism History.

Previously, Dr. Garza was an associate professor at the Bob Schieffer College of Communications at Texas Christian University, where she focused on English and Spanish language news, digital media, literacy, and the media and civil rights. Before working in academia, Dr. Garza was a reporter for Bloomberg News, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, and the Los Angeles Times.

Dr. Garza’s other accolades include the Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History. She has also received awards from the American Journalism Historians Association and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She is the author and editor of several books, including They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression. Dr. Garza has also published numerous journal articles and presented at many conferences.

Before her media work, Dr. Garza earned an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard University. She later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Melita Garza