Natalie Mendoza

Professor Mendoza specializes in Mexican American and Chicanx history, U.S. Latinx history, U.S. civil rights history, and the history of race and racism in the United States.

At the undergraduate level, Professor Mendoza teaches courses on Mexican American and Latinx history in the United States. Some of the courses she offers include: "American History since 1865," "Mexican American History since 1848," and "Latinos/as in the US since 1848." At the gradaute level, she teaches a pedagogy course called "Teaching History in the University."

Professor Mendoza graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from Sonoma State University in Northern California where she taught high school history for a short time before earning her Ph.D. in History from the University of California Berkeley. Her current book project, Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Identity and Civil Rights during World War II, examines the impact of geopolitics and war on intellectual thought, identity formation, and civil rights activism within the Mexican American population in the pre-Chicano period. Her first article, “Good Neighbor in the American Historical Imagination: Mexican American Intellectual Thought in the Fight for Civil Rights, 1930s-1940s,” is forthcoming in the Western Historical Quarterly. During the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Mendoza was the David J. Weber Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies Clements Center for Southwest Studies  in Texas, where she spent the year revising her Good Neighbor at Home manuscript.

In addition to studying the past, Professor Mendoza has an active research agenda in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History (HistorySoTL), a body of literature that uses theoretical and evidence-based research to examine the discipline-specific problems in the teaching and learning of history. Professor Mendoza first came to CU Boulder as the project lead for the History Teaching & Learning Project (2017-2019), in which she relied upon her training as a historian and her expertise in HistorySoTL to direct a department-wide effort to improve undergraduate curriculum.

Professor Mendoza has also done extensive work to improve history education at multiple levels. She has consulted for K-12 social studies teachers in both California and Colorado, taught a pedagogy course and facilitated workshops for graduate students at UC Berkeley and CU Boulder, helped found the Teaching History Conference to support teachers and professors across the K-16 continuum, and served on an ad hoc committee for the American Historical Association tasked with drafting a statement on the value of SoTL in History to the discipline. Professor Mendoza currently serves as a regional officer for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, and as an advisory board member for #PlainTalkHistory, a website resource for critical history lessons for a multiracial democracy.

Professor Mendoza is not currently accepting graduate students.