Associate Professor of English Genaro M. Padilla is the new associate dean of the Office of Undergraduate Advising in the College of Letters and Science effective January of this year. He succeeds Professsor Bob Jacobsen, who served in this position from 2005 until last July.

The Advising Office also said goodbye to Avis Hinkson, the director of the OUA for the past six years, who left L&S this month after accepting the position of dean of Barnard College in New York — her alma mater.

One of the leading scholars of Mexican-American literature in the United States, Padilla has been on faculty in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley since 1987. His numerous awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Premio Critical Nueva for excellence in literary scholarship from the University of New Mexico, a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and the William Kimball Rice Fellowship at Stanford University Humanities Center.

“We are pleased to welcome Professor Genaro Padilla as our new associate dean,” says Tyler Stovall, dean of the Undergraduate Division. “I wish Avis Hinkson well in her new position and look forward to working with Genaro."  

The Office of Undergraduate Advising provides academic support to the 18,000 undergraduate students in the College of Letters and Science. The advisors guide students from their earliest orientation days through graduation, helping them with course selection and planning, choice of major, progress to degree, and referrals.