Garza hired as endowed business journalism professor at Illinois

Melita M. Garza has been appointed as the Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism and an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

During her two-decades in journalism, Garza worked as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg News, and as an associate editor of the McKinsey Quarterly in London. She is a SABEW and Chicago Headline Club award winner for her business journalism, as well as a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

She is the author of “They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression,” which documents the way English- and Spanish-language newspapers covered Mexican American and immigrant workers during the nation’s steepest economic downturn.

She joins the Illinois College of Media this fall after 10 years at Texas Christian University, where she founded the school’s business journalism courses.

Garza holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a PhD in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an AB in government from Harvard University.