Rate My Professor Humberto Garcia

Humberto Garcia is the Vincent Hillyer Chair and Professor of Literature in the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of California, Merced, where he serves as Department Chair within the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts. He earned his Ph.D. in 2007 and M.A. in 2003 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, accompanied by a certificate in Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and his B.A. in 2001 from Florida International University. Prior to UC Merced, Garcia taught at Vanderbilt University from 2007 to 2014, advancing to Associate Professor at UC Merced from 2015 to 2022 before becoming full Professor.

Garcia specializes in British Romanticism and eighteenth-century literature, emphasizing Romantic Orientalism, postcolonial criticism, and global/transnational studies. His scholarship examines intercultural exchanges between East and West, particularly the influence of Islamic ideas, histories, and cultures on English Enlightenment discourses and British authors' redefinition of liberty through engagement with the Muslim world. Major publications include Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), a corrective to Edward Said’s Orientalism highlighting influences on authors like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley; and England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores provincializing Britishness via Eurasian cosmopolitanism. His work received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2015–16. Garcia has published articles in Studies in Romanticism, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in English Literature, Common Knowledge (2017), and Huntington Library Quarterly (2018), and presented at national and international conferences, impacting understandings of British imperial and literary history. He teaches courses on eighteenth-century literature, Islam and literature, environmental ethics in literature, Introduction to Literary Studies, and Introduction to Poetry.