Our Alumni
About our Alumni
Alumni in Academics:
A history degree at Colorado College helps prepare you to pursue a graduate degree not only in history, but in a number of fields. Our program, which emphasizes critical thinking, archival research, and academic writing helps develop skills that are transferable across the academic world.
According to our 2021-2022 Alumni Survey, 17.6% of our alumni who go to graduate school study history, 15.8% study law, and 15.2% study education.
Alumni in the Professional World:
Our alumni go on to find success in a number of different fields and careers. Some dedicate their lives to history, while others branch out into other fields. Regardless, our Alumni agree that the critical thinking, research, analytical, and writing skills they learn as history majors help them succeed in their chosen professions. The nuanced and diverse worldview that a study of history fosters stays with them forever.
Our alumni go on to careers such as:
According to our 2021-2022 Alumni Survey, 8.5% of our alumni end up working in history, 5.6% work in education, 1.6% work in law, and 7.2% work in other history adjacent fields.
Featured Alumni
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg graduated in 1985, and pursued graduate study in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her MA in 1986, and PhD in 1991. From 1991-2000, she taught at Illinois State University. Since 2000, she has taught at Iowa State University. She teaches a number of different classes, but her favorites are America Eats (a food history class) and the US in the 20th Century, 1900-1945. She also regularly works with graduate students. She has supervised 25 master’s students, and 20 PhD students. She is the editor or author of six books. Her seventh, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, is due out in the summer of 2022. She is a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society, and a Distinguished Professor – the first ever in Iowa State’s History Department. She lives in Ames, Iowa, with her husband, son, and two cats.
Lauren McArthur Harris (’91) is an Associate Professor of History Education at Arizona State University. After graduation (and a few years skiing in the Colorado mountains), Lauren taught high school history in Arlington, VA. She then earned her PhD in Educational Studies, with emphasis on history/social studies education, at the University of Michigan. Lauren teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in ASU’s history department and the Teachers College, mainly centered on preparing secondary history teachers. She is the co-editor of two books, The Wiley Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (Wiley Blackwell, 2018) and the forthcoming Teaching Difficult Histories in Difficult Times: Stories of Practice (Teachers College Press, 2022). Lauren enjoys hiking, biking, and running with her family in the Arizona desert and mountains
I graduated from CC in December 2004. I received my Master's in Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. After getting my master's degree, I moved to Montreal, Canada and worked as a liaison librarian at McGill University. After that, I took a position as a law librarian at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia, eventually moving to a position as a librarian at the university's Centre for Education Futures. After several years living in Japan, I returned to Montreal in 2021 to take the position of Instructional Services Coordinator at the Concordia University Library.
My publications are here: https://concordia.academia.edu/MeganFitzgibbons
I graduated from CC in 2008, and the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 2014. In between, I was a ski bum in Durango, CO and Salt Lake City, UT. Since 2014, I have practiced law, specializing in cannabis law, criminal defense, small and start-up businesses, estate planning and benefit plans, and most recently blockchain technologies. I currently operate my own small firm and am also of counsel at The Eichner Law Firm and The Rodman Law Group. In 2019 I served as Chair of the Colorado Bar Association Cannabis Law Section, a cannabis-centric group of attorneys that I helped to found. My law practice is nontraditional in nature, both in subjects and schedule, and the block plan definitely helped me to forge such a unique path. I live in Lakewood, CO with my wife Ruth, who is also a CC history grad, and our dog Zeb.
I graduated from The Colorado College in 2004 with a major in History/Philosophy. After CC, I worked as a ski instructor, did some traveling, and then started my teaching career with a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Texas State University. I got interested in civic engagement strategies for teaching US History and made that the focus of a Ph.D. in social studies education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
In 2013 I joined the faculty at Salisbury University in Maryland. I’m now an associate professor, mostly teaching undergraduate courses in social studies education. I’m also the Director of the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, a campus-wide office focused on political and community engagement. I won an endowed professorship from the University System of Maryland in 2018 for my work leading campus/community partnerships like the Center for Civic Reflection and our ShoreCorps/AmeriCorps program.
I’ve also become increasingly interested in Holocaust education, and the ways that people use the Holocaust as a proxy for talking about how people should behave in a democracy. I’ve completed fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights in New York. Since 2015 I’ve led a seminar on Holocaust education, which eventually contributed to my first book, On Becoming a Holocaust Education: Purposeful Pedagogy through Inquiry, released this October by Teachers College Press and the National Writing Project.
My amazing wife (Kat Chapman Pope, ’04) coordinates missing person’s operations for the mid-Atlantic region. My inspiring daughter is a voraciously-reading fifth grader. My rollicking son is a fierce soccer playing second grader. We would all prefer to be at the beach.
show all / hide all