Dr. Katharina Matro is fluent in three (and a half) languages, has two Master’s degrees, a P.h.D, two young children, and a new job in the Upper School history department at Stone Ridge.
While this is Dr. Matro’s first year as a full time teacher, this is not her first year as a member of the Stone Ridge community. Dr. Matro worked as a long term sub last year, teaching economics.
“I love how welcoming the community is and I felt comfortable right off the bat,” noted Dr. Matro about her experience teaching at Stone Ridge last year
This year, Dr. Matro has taken on a larger role, teaching three sections of freshman world history and one section of economics.
“It’s much easier to teach one class of seniors than teaching three sections of first acs and one class of seniors.”
Dr. Matro grew up in a rural town in Western Germany and attended Catholic school for most of her life. Coming to Stone Ridge felt “like a homecoming” because of all the similarities between her childhood school and Stone Ridge.
At age 19, Dr. Matro left Germany and came to the United States to attend Amherst College where she majored French and History. She went on to earn a Master’s degree in International Economics and European History from the School of Advanced International Studies and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Matro continued her studies at Stanford University where she earned a Master’s degree in Central European history, worked as a teaching fellow, and earned her P.h.D.
Dr. Matro’s love of history began in her youth, and has continued through today as the driving force behind her education
“I love studying about how things used to be and trying to imagine what I would have done to empathize with the decision making of the past and also to think about where did we come from, and why is it this way, how did we evolve.”
Dr. Matro discovered her love of economics during her sophomore year at Amherst
“I thought it was amazing and explained so much of current events and about what’s going on in the world,” Dr. Matro said.
After a brief period working at a economic think tank in D.C., Dr. Matro returned to her original love, history, and began her research for her P.h.D dissertation on life in post-World War II life in Poland. Dr. Matro says that she is most proud of completing her dissertation in conjunction with becoming a mother.
“To then still have the energy and the gumption to keep it up when it was so easy to say, ‘oh I don’t want to write 500 words today, I want to just play with my baby,’… that I stuck with it is what I’m most proud of,” she said.
Dr. Matro has two daughters, ages two and a half and five.
“Seeing them have an american childhood, which is not something I had, and is very unfamiliar because my American life started at age 19… What they’re going through – the activities – now I’m supposed to sign her up for all this stuff and I’m like, ‘I never did any of that.’ And it might not be Germany versus America, but raising children now versus 30 years ago.”
Dr. Matro’s accomplishments – in both her professional life and her personal life – set an impressive bar for young people to look up to. We are happy to have her as new member of the Stone Ridge faculty.