Douglas Monroy

Douglas Monroy is Professor of History at The Colorado College. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Hollywood High School and UCLA, he presently lives in Colorado Springs, though he spends the equivalent of at least two months per year in Southern California. He has two grown children and a 13 year-old. A mainstay of the faculty softball team at Colorado College for nearly three decades, Doug also plays tennis and golf.

He is the author of Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California, winner of the James Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, both from the University of California Press and, most recently, The Borders Within: Encounters between Mexico and the US, from the University of Arizona Press. Professor Monroy serves on the OAH Distinguished Speakers Series. For the 2004-2005 year he was the Ray Allen Billington Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Huntington Library and Occidental College. At Colorado College he teaches courses on 20th Century US history, the history of the Southwest and its arts and literature, and historiography. He has led numerous workshops and seminars for K-12 teachers on a variety of issues related to his scholarly work.

As a child he was mostly interested in sports; as a college student in the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements, and in the world of politics and ideas; and Doug Monroy's values, beliefs, and activities have remained consistent with this earlier socialization. Added to this mix has been a strong dose of neo-Freudian thinking and wrestling with the issue of how to mix pleasures with family, environmental, and social responsibility.