Michael Fitzgerald, History Department, is director of ARMS and also the director of the Africa and the Americas concentration. Professor Fitzgerald teaches African American and Southern history, especially the Civil War Era. His scholarly specialties include Reconstruction and emancipation, and also Garveyism in the Twentieth Century. Professor Fitzgerald was raised in Los Angeles and did his undergraduate and graduate work at UCLA.
Heather Campbell, Education Department, teaches the English as a second language (ESL) licensure courses including an ARMS class focused on issues facing ESL students and teachers. Prior to teaching full time at St. Olaf, Professor Campbell taught English as a foreign language in Slovakia, ESL in St. Paul, science in Minneapolis, and directed the St. Olaf Upward Bound program. Urban education and educational opportunity are two areas of particular interest to Professor Campbell.
Mary Carlsen, Department of Family and Social Service/ Social Work Program, teaches courses in social welfare and social work which examine the impact of social welfare policies and programs on diverse communities and individuals. The courses emphasize how people who experience oppression and discrimination can become empowered and work for social change. Mary's earlier research interests included the impact of HIV/AIDS in the lives of African-Americans; her current interests include cultural differences in grief, loss, and end of life care.
Joan Hepburn, English Department, graduated with a doctorate from Brown University, and taught in an array of institutions, including Fordham University. She has been a member of the English Department of St. Olaf since 1987 where she has taught and directed programs on and off campus, African and the Americas, American Racial and Multicultural Studies, and Ghana and Namibia among them. Off campus, she has led Theater Interims to South Africa and to New York, in Contemporary and West African Drama in English these being her fields of study.
Judy Kutulas, History Department, teaches history, American Studies, Media Studies, and Women's Studies. Professor Kutulas is also currently the director of the St. Olaf Women's Studies program. Because most of her classes focus on 20th century American history and culture, most are also about multcultural issues. Her publications include The American Civil Liberties Union and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Univerty of North Carolina Press, 2006), The Long War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940 (Duke University Press, 1995), and many articles on media. Her current project, an exploration of 1970s popular culture, will examine, among other things, the cultural moment when Americans think they embrace "diversity."
Matthew Rohn, Art & Art History Department, teaches courses mostly about art and visual culture since 1900. He helped launch the American Conversations program.
His scholarship and teaching has long explored the interplay among cultural concerns (including race and gender), social norms and resistance to those norms, and the visial imagination.
He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, went to George Washington University in Washington D.C. (where he had the joy of interning at the Smithsonian's newly founded, neighborhood-based, Anacostia Museum) he did his graduate studies at the University of Michigan.
Mary Titus, English Department, teaches courses in American literature with a special interest in the literature of the American South, as well as issues of race and gender in American culture. She teaches in Women's Studies and in the American Conversation program and directs the Center for Integrative Studies.
Mary was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in New York, and did her graduate work at the University of North Carolina.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, English
Torin Alexander, English
