Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, English Department and Director of American Racial and Multicultural Studies

Professor Kwon Dobbs is interested in Asian American studies, creative writing, critical adoption studies, opera, and translation. Her debut collection, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press 2007), received the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award. Her writing has appeared in journals and magazines in Europe, North America, South Korea, and New Zealand; has been anthologized in Echoes upon Echoes (Asian American Writers Workshop 2003), and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton 2008); featured on radio and in film; and translated into Greek, Korean, and Turkish. Widely collaborative, she has worked with composers, dance choreographers, and video artists to set her poetry to music and movement and to develop films drawing from her scholarship on overseas Korean adoption. Currently, Professor Kwon Dobbs is working with the Korean Unwed Mothers and Families Association on a book about the mothers' life narratives.

email: dobbs@stolaf.edu

Torin Alexander, Religion Department

Professor Alexander's teaching and research areas include American Christianity, African American religion and religious experience, and theory and method for the study of religion. He is the author of several encyclopedia articles, book reviews, and is co-author with Stephen C. Finley of a chapter in Faith in America (Praeger Publishers, 2006). In addition, he is a former editorial assistant for Religious Studies Review and The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin and an assistant editor for The Encyclopedia of African American Religious Culture (ABC-CLIO).

E-mail: alexandt@stolaf.edu

Heather Campbell, Education Department

Professor Campbell teaches the ESL course sequence, Reading and Differentiated Instruction, Introduction to Standards and Technology, and Introduction to Academic Writing for international students. Her areas of interest include educational opportunity, ELL educational issues, and literacy assessment, and urban.

email: campbelh@stolaf.edu

Mary Carlsen, Department of Social Work and Family Studies

Professor Carlsen teaches courses in social welfare and social work which examine the impact of social welfare policies and programs on diverse communities and individuals.

Professor Carlsen'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.

email: carlsen@stolaf.edu

Devyani Chandran Social Work and Family Studies

Michael Fitzgerald, History Department

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. On Sabbatical 2011-12.

email: fitz@stolaf.edu

Carlos Gallego is an Associate Professor of English. He is originally from the U.S.-Mexico border town of Nogales, AZ (raised on both sides of the border). He graduated from the University of Arizona in 1994, and afterward attended Stanford University where he received his doctorate in English literature in 2003. While finishing his dissertation, Carlos worked as an educator with at-risk middle school and high school students in central and south Tucson. His research interests include Chicano/a studies, 20th century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, philosophy and critical theory, and cultural studies. He has published work in the academic journals Biography, Aztlan, Cultural Critique and Western Humanities Review. His book, Chicana/o Subjectivity and the Politics of Identity: Between Recognition and Revolution, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.

Joan Hepburn, English Department

Professor Hepburn teaches African and the Americas, American Racial and Multicultural Studies.

Her interest in drama and ritual take her around the world. She seeks out not only West African drama written in English, but also plays by Caribbean and American writers whose work shows a direct African influence.

She loves the challenge of research and cultural exchange, and communicating to students that there are other ways of being. She would like her classes to celebrate diverse cultural groups and to awaken students.

email: hepburn@stolaf.edu

Abdulai Iddrisu, History Department

Abdulai Iddrisu teaches African History, Muslim Societies, and Women in Africa. His publications include “The Growth of Islamic Learning in Northern Ghana and its Interaction with Western Secular Education” Africa Development Vol. XXX, Nos. 1 & 2, (2005), pp. 20-34; “The Ghana Public Records and Archives Administration Department-Tamale: A Guide for Users” History in Africa: A Journal of Method, Vol. 27 (2000), pp. 449-453.  He has also published in various journals including the Canadian Journal of African Studies, Islam Et Societés Au Du Sahara, The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, and the Journal for Islamic Studies among others. His article on “Education Colonial and Missionary” appeared in Vol. 4 of Koninklijike Brill’s Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures: Family, Body and Health, (2006) edited by Suad Joseph and Afsaneh Najmabadi and “Zangina” in the Dictionary of African Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jn. and Emmanuel K. Acheampong (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Abdulai is the author of Contesting Islam in Africa: Homegrown Wahhabism and Muslim Identity in northern Ghana, 1920-2010 (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012).

Judy Kutulas, History Department

Professor Kutulas is based in the History Department, where she teaches recent US History courses and US Women's History courses. Her interdisciplinary teaching include Women's Studies, American Studies, and Media Studies, she helped organize both the American Conversations Program and the Media Studies Program.

email: kutulas@stolaf.edu

Jonathan Naito, English Department

In both his research and teaching, Professor Naito is deeply interested in race, ethnicity, and other forms of identity in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Examples of his past courses include Black and Asian British Literature, Transatlantic Anglophone Literature, and Transnational Literature--a theory-intensive seminar composed of three units:  “The Triangular Trade, Diaspora Theory, and Transnational Literature,” “Gender, Sexuality, and Transnational Asian American Literature,” and “South Asia, Globalization, and Planetarity.” His past publications include "Samuel Beckett and the Black Atlantic" in The Black and Green Atlantic (Palgrave, 2009) and "Cruel and Unusual Light: Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane's The Monster" in Arizona Quarterly.

Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb, Sociology Anthropology Department

Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb holds degrees in sociology from the University of Michigan (B.A.), Harvard University (M.A.), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D.).  He has taught at St. Olaf since 1982.

Bruce teaches a variety of courses in the department, some of which are also a part of St. Olaf interdisciplinary majors such as Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, and American Racial and Multicultural Studies.  He was also very active in St. Olaf's Paracollege (an alternative college within St. Olaf) until that program ended in the spring of 2001. He also taught in the American Conversation program in 2001 and 2002.

Bruce and his wife Barbara have been involved in several of the college's semester study abroad programs in recent years. Most recently, they led Term in the Middle East, fall semester of 2009. Highlights included the celebration of Ramadan in Istanbul, a month-long home-stay with Moroccan families in Fez, and climbing Mt. Sinai in Egypt. They also spent time in Israel and Palestine after the program ended, as did many of the students, visiting Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Becca Richards, English Department specilazing in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English.

Professor Richards teaches writing, women's studies, and media studies courses. While she researches women in position of political power, corporate writing practices, and writing pedogogy, all of her research is attentive to the intersecions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and ablility. She is interseted antiracist feminist coalition building and examination, critiques, and complications of US whiteness.

Matthew Rohn, Art & Art History Department
His scholarship and teaching explores the interplay among cultural concerns (including race and gender), social norms and resistance to those norms, and the visial imagination.

Professor Rohn teaches Art History and cultural studies, Women Studies, Environmental Studies, American Studies, and American Conversations courses.

He has special interests in 19th and 20th century art, American culture, gender and multi-cultural studies, social justice, and the art of teaching.

email: rohn@stolaf.edu

Ted Thornhill, Sociology and Anthropology Department

Professor Thornhill teaches Introduction to Sociology; Race and Class in American Culture; Class, Status, and Power; and Crime, Law, and Society. His research interests include racism and antiracism; critical race theory; African American history and culture; crime and social control; and American Evangelicalism.

email: thornhil@stolaf.edu

Mary Titus, English Department, Her scholarship is primarily on 19th and early 20th century American literature, especially literature of the American South.

Professor Titus is interested in the relationships between literary texts and popular culture and has published essays on such topics as slave narratives, food and race, and myths of Southern womanhood.

She teaches in Women's Studies and in the American Conversation program.

email: titus@stolaf.edu