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St. Olaf announces faculty promotions, tenure

By Peter Hill '08
February 28, 2008

St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Jim May has announced that 10 St. Olaf faculty members have been promoted to professor or associate professor, and five have been granted tenure.

The faculty members who were promoted to full professor are Mary Carlsen, Julie Legler, James McKeel, Meg Ojala, Steve Reece and Janice Roberts. Faculty members Jason Engbrecht, Rika Ito, Karil Kucera and Jeffrey Schwinefus were promoted to associate professor. Ariel Strichartz, as well as Engbrecht, Ito, Kucera and Schwinefus were granted tenure.

Promoted to professor
Carlsen graduated from St. Olaf in 1979 with a degree in social work, and she currently directs the college's social work program. She has worked in medical social work for 28 years. She has published in several international journals and served as a Policy Fellow at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Legler joined St. Olaf in 2001 after working for eight years at the National Institutes of Health. She earned a doctorate in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health. She directs the statistics program at St. Olaf and is active in advising student research projects. She has co-authored dozens of articles, contributed to two textbooks and presented at conferences throughout North America.

McKeel teaches voice at St. Olaf. He has performed more than 60 opera roles and appeared at the Guthrie Theater, Kennedy Center and England's Aldeburgh Festival. In addition, he has composed more than 50 works including operas, operettas, musicals, choral works, art songs and song cycles.

Ojala received her M.F.A. from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and she teaches photography courses, history of photography and senior studies in studio art at St. Olaf. Her photography has been exhibited at the Groveland, Thomson and Parts galleries in Minneapolis and the Tisch School of Fine Arts at New York University, among others. In 2002 she was commissioned by the McKnight Foundation to help photograph "Twin Cities Treasures," which refer to open spaces that will be the focus of future conservation and protection efforts.

A member of the St. Olaf classics faculty since 1994, Reece has published articles on such topics as Homer, oral traditions and historical linguistics, as well as a book titled The Stranger's Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene. His research has included positions at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, and the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.

A former dancer with the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City, Roberts has taught master classes in dance at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota State University-Mankato and the Hennepin Center for the Arts. In 1995 Roberts and her husband were Sage Cowles Land Grant Artists in Dance at the University of Minnesota.

Other faculty
Engbrecht teaches in the physics department at St. Olaf. For five years he has led a group of students in researching positrons antiparticles of the electron that have identical mass but an opposite charge. In 2006 he received a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

Ito joined St. Olaf in 2002 after a decade of teaching Japanese at the high school and college levels. A year earlier, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship doing sociolinguistic research on British English at the University of York, England.

After completing interim teaching posts at Dartmouth College, Lewis and Clark College, and the University of Washington-Seattle, Kucera joined St. Olaf in 2002 as the Luce Assistant Professor of Asian Visual Culture. In addition to pursuing her primary research interest -- cliff sculptures at the 12th century Buddhist cave site of Baodingshan in Sichuan province -- Kucera explores the role of digital imaging in teaching.

Schwinefus has been a member of the chemistry faculty at St. Olaf since 2002. He, along with colleague Greg Muth, received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2005 to emphasize thermodynamic principles in junior- and senior- level students' laboratory work. He serves on the Health Professions Committee and has been active in the summer research program at St. Olaf.

First exposed to Hispanic culture during her childhood in New Mexico, Strichartz teaches Spanish and Hispanic studies at St. Olaf. Her research interests include theatre in South America's Southern Cone, particularly that of Argentina and Chile, theater under dictatorship, and literary exploration of the culinary.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.