This week, Ordinary Life features a guest speaker, Dr. William F. Monroe, recently retired dean of the University of Houston Honors College

Dr. Monroe has titled his presentation to Ordinary Life, “Stories and the Shaping of Character.”

 From our earliest childhood, stories have shaped us as individuals.  Elie Wiesel, writer, political activist, and Holocaust survivor wrote, “People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell,” and if this is true, we all do well to reflect on those stories that mean the most to us, those stories that we return to, and those that come to us along the way, surprising and changing us.

 Dr. Monroe undertook a "human subjects" research project to understand what stories were most important to successful people, including Dr. Denton Cooley, famed heart surgeon, and Price Daniel, Sr., a legend in the history of Texas government. 

Bill’s findings and stories illustrate how myth, plot, parable, and narrative shape our own perceptions and motivations.  Come prepared to share which stories were (and are) most important to you… and why.

 Biography:

Bill Monroe recently retired from the University of Houston where he was a professor of English and Nancy O'Connor Abendshein Professor, and Dean of the Honors College. He earned a B.A. with Highest Honors, Special Honors in English, at the University of Texas and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

After completing an M.A. he worked as managing editor of The Liberty Vindicator, a newspaper in East Texas, taught at the Kashmere, Sharpstown, and Waltrip campuses of Houston Community College, and returned to graduate school for a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

 In addition to teaching in "The Human Situation," a course that features classics from antiquity and modernity, for over 35 years Dr. Monroe has taught honors seminars on narrative, rhetoric, and literature. He has given public talks, published editorials and essays in newspapers, magazines, and journals, led book clubs, and facilitated master classes for secondary teachers of English.

He is the director of the new Inprint Educators Institute (IEI), which will launch June 21. IEI will focus on stories and storytelling as professional, developmental, social, and personal resources for both educators and students.

 Dr. Monroe is the founding director of Medicine and Society, a program for those who wish to explore issues of health and health care through academic courses, research, fieldwork, internships, conferences, and keynote lectures. He is also the founding president of the University of Houston Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and serves as president of the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni Association of Greater Houston.

He has led learning abroad travel to Israel and Palestine, Greece, Rome, Turkey, England, Scotland, Ireland, Egypt, Jordan, and Northern and Eastern Europe. In 2004 Dr. Monroe was honored with the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award and was twice nominated by the University for the state-wide Minnie Stevens Piper Professor award. He is presently working on a manuscript entitled The Vocation of Affliction: Flannery O'Connor and the Myth of Mastery.