Rachel Arteaga is Associate Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities. In this role, she works closely with the faculty director and in collaboration with all members of the Simpson Center staff on the development, implementation, and assessment of academic projects, initiatives, and programs central to its mission. She advises applicants seeking research funding through the Simpson Center's fellowship and grant programs, and is a main point of contact for institutional partners in the region, particularly for questions pertaining to public scholarship, the development of new models for doctoral education, and professionalization across sectors in the humanities.

Arteaga writes and speaks regularly on the value of the humanities and on professional life in higher education. Her most recent article, a manifesto on humanities funding and infrastructure, appears in the inaugural issue of the open-access journal Public Humanities. A short essay for the ADE Bulletin offers a reflection on a wide range of career directions for PhDs in English. Commentary for Inside Higher Ed, co-authored with Cristóbal A. Borges and Jim Jewell, gives advice on how doctoral students can effectively prepare for and obtain faculty positions at two-year colleges. And her introduction to Public Scholarship in Literary Studies (Amherst College Press, 2021), a collection of essays she co-edited with Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, outlines the stakes and institutional contexts of the many forms of publicly-engaged teaching, writing, and research underway in literary studies in and beyond English departments in the United States and Canada.

She has served as chair of the Association of Departments of English (ADE) Ad Hoc Committee on English Majors’ Career Preparation & Outcomes—the committee's full report includes salary and workforce sector data, curricular recommendations, and detailed case studies—and as an elected member of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association (MLA). She is a member of the Council of Advisors for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), and has served on planning and review committees for the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Humanities Washington, our state humanities council. Her scholarly work on American literature has been published in the Flannery O’Connor Review, Literature Interpretation Theory, and Early American Literature. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Washington.