Contributions and Distinctions
Margarita Melville was a professor and associate dean of the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley where she contributed to academic policy and curriculum development. She founded a scholarship focused on Chicano, Mexican American women’s experiences, feminism, and social justice. She also did research that helped legitimize and expand ethnic and women’s studies in universities by centering the lived experiences of Mexican American women within academic discourse.
Biographical Sketch
At the University of California, Berkeley, Margarita Melville served as a professor and associate dean and played a significant role in academic leadership and the development of socially engaged scholarship. She also chaired the Ethnic Studies Department, where she helped strengthen ethnic studies as a core part of Berkeley’s academic mission and supported curriculum development focused on race, gender, and social inequality.
A former nun for twenty years, Margarita Melville joined UC Berkeley in 1986 after teaching at the University of Houston and brought with her a strong background in both scholarship and activism. Following a two year prison sentence for participating in antiwar protests as part of the Cantonsville Nine, she earned an M.A. in Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University, training that informed her teaching and research at Berkeley. Her book, Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women (1980), became an influential text in ethnic and women’s studies at Berkeley and reflected her broader commitment to advocating for marginalized communities, shaped in part by her human rights work in Guatemala with her husband, Thomas Melville.