William Monroe’s teaching career began as a grad student at the University of Texas and included Houston Community College, McMurry University in Abilene, and the University of Houston. In 1922, he retired from UH as professor of English and Nancy O’Connor Abendshein Professor and Dean of the Honors College. Since then he has taught at the University of St. Thomas, at Texas State University in San Marcos, and at Rice.
A staged reading of Primary Care, a play about Alzheimer’s disease that Monroe wrote and directed, was presented by the UT McGovern Medical School for a “Healthcare and the Arts” conference in 2023. He completed a first draft of the play, inspired by medical research done by his collaborator Dr. Thomas R. Cole, during a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Medical Humanities, UTMB-Galveston.
Monroe’s critical work on twentieth-century literature, Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation, was selected as an outstanding academic book of the year and nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. He was chosen to participate in an NEH Institute on Narrative at the University of Iowa and has been featured on a number of radio programs and podcasts, including an Engines of Our Ingenuity episode, “Doctors and Detectives,” on Sherlock Holmes and, on KPFT, a So, What’s Your Story episode featuring a story by Dr. Denton Cooley. He has also been working on a book-length manuscript entitled “The Vocation of Affliction: Flannery O’Connor and the Myth of Mastery.”
In addition to Flannery O’Connor, Monroe’s teaching and research interests have included T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, Walker Percy, and Raymond Carver as well as courses, presentations, and publications in the fields of literature and medicine and health humanities. He received the UH Teaching Excellence Award, was twice nominated for a state-wide Piper Professor Award, and served for 25 years as the director and seminar leader in the Common Ground Teachers Institute, a collaborative endeavor between university faculty and secondary school teachers. In 2024 and 2025, Monroe presented papers on O’Connor at the American Literature Association Convention in Chicago and the “Flannery Abroad” conference in London. He has written several short memoirs and is currently teaching a Rice FWIS course entitled “Life Writing: Our Stories, Our Selves.”
Education
B.A., The University of Texas at Austin
M.A., The University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D., University of Chicago