About María
María E. Montoya is a Global Network Associate Professor of History at New York University and the former Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU Shanghai. She earned her BA, MA and PhD degrees at Yale University.
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Her research explores how workers and families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have used natural resources to make a living and make their homes in the American West with a particular focus on Colorado and New Mexico. She is the author of numerous articles on the History of the American West, Environmental, Labor and Latina/o history and of the book, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900. She is the lead author on the U.S. History textbook, Global Americans: A History of the United States now in its second edition from Cengage Publishing
Her new book, A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle over Industrial Democracy is out from from Oxford University Press.(You can pre-order it here.) The book examines both the prelude and aftermath to the violent industrial battles that took place in Colorado between the Ludlow Massacre in 1914 and the Columbine Massacre in 1927.
She is also working on two other book projects. The first looks at the scarcity of water in the American Southwest, and the Rio Grande in particular. The second project explores the impact of religious boarding schools on the Hispano populations of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico and how it shaped a close knit community into a diaspora of protestant migrants.
