Luis Monguió

Monguió received honorary doctorates from Mills College, University of Lima, as well as the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima (1971). He was académico correspondiente of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952.

Monguió studied law and philology in Barcelona and Madrid. From 1930 to 1938 he was in the Spanish diplomatic service in Valparaíso, Chile, and in French Morocco. He participated, on the Republican side, in the Battle of the Ebro (1938) in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he went with his American wife Helen Arnett de Monguió (†1977) to the United States, and studied Hispanic literature in Berkeley under de:Arturo Torres Rioseco (M.A., 1941). In 1942 he enlisted in the United States Army, and remarked that he was one of very few who participated in both the Battle of the Ebro and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1944 he became a U.S. citizen. From 1941 to 1942 and from 1946 until 1957 he taught Romance languages at Mills College. From 1957 to 1975, when he retired, he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1965 to 1968 was chairman of the Spanish and Portuguese Department. In 1980 he married his second wife, Alicia Colombí de Monguió, herself an important scholar on Spanish colonial literature. His final years followed her moves: Bennington College, University of Arizona, and finally University at Albany, where she ended her career as Distinguished Professor. Luis's final years were spent in the Albany area. He continued teaching until 1994, at both Bennington and the University at Albany.

Luis Monguió Primatesta (born June 25, 1908 in Tarragona, Spain; died July 10, 2005 in Clifton Park, New York) was an American Hispanist, professor of Spanish, and department head at the University of California-Berkeley.