Caitlin Sackrison is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. She specializes in immigration history, early modern and modern European history, Nordic and Scandinavian-American history, women in history, and gender and sexuality studies.
Caitlin completed her Masters Degree and Ph.D. in History at Brandeis University, and her dissertation focused on Norwegian immigrant women homesteaders in Minnesota in the aftermath of the US-Dakota War of 1862. In her dissertation, she also critically examined the ways in which Nordic immigrant settlement contributed to the forceful dispossession, displacement, and attempts at cultural erasure of indigenous peoples in North America.
Her early interest in women's history and migration history stemmed from her experiences as an undergraduate at Colgate University, where she wrote her honors thesis on women revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in the French Revolution. For her Master's Thesis on Europe in the interwar period (between World War I and World War II), she wrote about how women's fashion trends, as seen in prominent fashion magazines, highlighted changes in women's societal roles within and beyond the home. In most of her work, she explores how women are part of cultural and societal shifts, often through migration and immigration history. Her work also explores challenges to socially constructed and expected gender roles, highlighting the lives of women, men, and people who are gender nonconforming throughout history.
Current St. Olaf Courses:
NORST 100: Nordic Values (Fall 2025), HIST 188: Norwegian Immigration to Minnesota (Fall 2025)
Past St. Olaf Courses:
NORST 100B: Nordic Values (Spring 2025), NORST 264: Nordic Sexualities and Genders (Spring 2025), NORST 219: Religious (In)Tolerance in Scandinavia (January Term 2025, Spring 2025), HIST 188: Norwegian Immigration to Minnesota (Fall 2024)