Dean, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts

A fourth-generation Angeleno, Michael E. Engh, S.J., is Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, and professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He graduated from the-then Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1972 and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1981. Author of Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles (1992), he received his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He co-founded the Los Angeles History Seminar at the Huntington Library in 1991, a group he co-chaired for more than a dozen years. At the Huntington Library he was the co-chair and co-organizer of the March 2002 conference, "Behind the Cliches, Beyond the Hype: Race, Place and Community in Los Angeles."

Active in founding LMU's Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, Fr. Engh has edited two of its publications, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of Los Angeles, by James Thomas Keane (2000), and Richard Riordon and Los Angeles Charter Reform, by Matthew J. Parlow and James T. Keane (2001). He has published eighteen articles or chapters in books on the history of Los Angeles, the Catholic Church in the American West, and the history of LMU, as well as co-edited a documentary volume, The Frontiers and Catholic Identities (1999). His current project is a book-length biography of Mary Julia Workman, a Los Angeles Catholic social activist (active from 1890 to1960).

In other areas, Fr. Engh served for six years as a member of the Board of Trustees of Loyola Marymount University, and chaired the presidential search committee in 1998. He also has worked as a member of the board of editors for the Western Historical Quarterly and Southern California History. Presently, he is in his ninth year as a member of the school board for Dolores Mission Grammar School in Boyle Heights.

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Dean, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts