I was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois where my maternal grandparents settled after emigrating from Scandinavia during and shortly after Word War I. It was their story that first interested me in Scandinavian-American studies. A continuing interest in connections between Scandinavia and America gave an important theme to an undergraduate education at St. Olaf College; study for the ministry at Luther Theological Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota; and finally to doctoral work at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
Currently I am privileged to teach at St. Olaf College, where I serve as King Olav V Professor of Scandinavian American Studies, and to serve as editor of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.
I live in Northfield with my wife Kristin, a graduate of St. Olaf who is Chief of Medicine at the Veterans' Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Both of our sons are students at St. Olaf.
My research and writing is shaped by my work as editor of the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA), housed at St. Olaf and supported by the college since the association's founding in 1925. My most recent book is a volume of essays, Crossings: Norwegian-American Lutheranism as a Transatlantic Tradition.
Links
Here are some websites that I recommend for people with an interest in things Norwegian and American.
Make the website of Norwegian-American Historical Association your first stop. It is
http://www.naha.stolaf.edu.
Colleagues in the department of Norwegian at St. Olaf have put together an excellent site that is not only an introduction to their work here at the college but gateway to other sources. Check it out at http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/norwegian/.
Although not a genealogist, I recently enjoyed exploring the resources available online through the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island. Sample the diversity of America and look for the stories of individual immigrants at http://www.ellisisland.org.
For the wealth of resources available at Vesterheim, the Norwegian-American museum located in Decorah, Iowa, visit http://www.vesterheim.org.
Books
In the hearing of a splendid teacher with whom I studied at St. Olaf, I once during my student days dismissed a great work of literature as a piece of hackwork. He kept a wise and patient silence at the time. Sometime later I read the book again, reconsidered my rash judgment, and suggested to another fabled St. Olaf pedagogue that the book in question might after all be a work of eminent value. His remark: "The book must have changed." From the experience and the gentle wisdom of these two teachers I learned, among other things, the value of reading books over again. Last summer I reread two novels by the late Minnesotan, J.F. Powers, Morte D'Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green. I recommend them for reading and rereading by people with a care for things essential to the conversation that is St. Olaf College.
