Desirée J. Garcia

Garcia received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University and her B.A. in History from Wellesley College. She has taught at institutions large and small, including Mount Holyoke College, Ursinus College, and Arizona State University.

Her most recent book, The Dressing Room: Backstage Stories and American Film, is about race and gender in backstage film narratives. A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society's norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot, and on what terms. 

Garcia has also written The Movie Musical for Rutgers' Quick Takes (Movies and Popular Culture) Series in which she explores the musical as a socially-relevant, adaptable, and mediating transnational genre.

In her first book, The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (Rutgers University Press, 2014), Garcia traces the history of early sound era musicals from the makers of African American films and the transnational networks of Yiddish and Mexican cinema. As such, the book is also the first to document the role of immigrants and migrants in the making of the genre, both inside and outside of Hollywood. Challenging notions that the genre is merely escapist entertainment, The Migration of Musical Film shows the musical to be a significant cultural product that has withstood the test of time precisely because it has ministered to peoples of different backgrounds as they negotiated their position within American society. Musicals made by marginalized communities were resonant and influential cultural products that developed a formal language in response to the concerns of their communities, a language that was ultimately incorporated into what we consider to be the Hollywood musical. The book destabilizes the notion of film genre as a nation-bound concept and instead, positions the musical film as a site of multiple points of cultural convergence, social conflict, and artistic creation.

Desirée Garcia's teaching at Dartmouth includes courses on Videographic Criticism, The Musical, Mexican Cinema, Race and Gender in American Film, and the Latinx Stage and Screen.