There will be a total of 4 roundtable discussions at the CC 2025 conference:
Roundtable I: Norwegian Migration, Past and Present, in Post-Secondary Course Design
Participants: Melissa Gjellstad (University of North Dakota)
Ida Moen Johnson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Caitlin Sackrison (St. Olaf College)
Tanya Thresher (St. Olaf College)
Ingrid Urberg (University of Alberta, Augustana Campus)
Over the past twenty-five years, several of us teaching Scandinavian Studies in North America and Norway have developed course modules and even entire courses focusing on universal migration themes. These courses and modules explore common experiences among emigrants who left Norway for North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and immigrants to Norway in more recent times. Models of multiculturalism, linguistic challenges, motivations for emigration, and intergenerational cultural dissonance are sample topics we cover.
The participants in this roundtable will share courses, strategies and materials they have developed to explore parallels and contrasts in the migrant experiences of Norwegian migrants to North America in the past and migrants to Norway today. Strategies include experiential learning and flipped classrooms, and materials include migrant fiction, memoir, and popular media. By sharing our experiences, we hope to learn from each other and encourage others to explore these themes in their courses.
Roundtable II: Norwegian-American Institutions of Higher Learning
Participants: Dean Krouk (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Maren Johnson (Luther College)
Kari Lie Dorer (St. Olaf College)
Olivia Gunn (University of Washington, Seattle)
Melissa Gjellstad (University of North Dakota, Grand Forks)
In the field of higher education, one of the major impacts of the Norwegian/Scandinavian migration to North America has been the presence of academic programs where college and university students can study the languages, cultures, histories, and literatures of the Nordic region. Important sites for such study centered in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, and Washington. This presentation will explore some of the key personalities and eras in the history of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, St. Olaf College, Luther College, the University of North Dakota, and the University of Washington. Some of the main questions will include: what were the course offerings in the early days of the program, and how have they changed over the decades? What were the early fields of academic expertise represented among the faculty, and how has there been both continuity and change in faculty research?
Roundtable III: Teaching in a Transatlantic Classroom
Participants: Sean Taylor (University of Minnesota, Moorhead)
Jens Hyvik (University of Oslo)
This roundtable discussion examines a new type of global education, the transatlantic classroom. In spring 2025 we taught a course on Norwegian migration to the US to highlight the 200th anniversary of the first major Norwegian migration to the US. Professors from the Minnesota State University system at both Moorhead and Mankato, combined with professors at the University of South-Eastern Norway and the director of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum in Hamar, Norway, worked together to teach this online class. The course is unique in that it was taught jointly at institutions in Norway and the US through online teaching, but students followed the course syllabus and examination program at their own university. We will present our experiences teaching in transatlantic classrooms between Norway and the US, highlighting elements that worked and the challenges we faced. We will then open the floor for a discussion about how this type of study could be improved, adapted, and made attractive to both students and faculty interested in global education.
The course covered the history of Norwegian migration to the United States from 1825 to the present. It examined the reasons for emigration from Norway and the development of Norwegian-American communities in the United States. Among other things, the course examined the immigrants; diverse experiences, their notions of ethnicity, their relationship to American society in general and the indigenous population in the United States, as well as transatlantic relations between Norway and the United States until the present. By using primary and secondary sources, students worked together to actively build a better understanding of the social, cultural, political, and economic reasons for why Norwegians left their homeland and came to the United States. They also learned about the relationship between Norwegian-Americans and American society as well as transatlantic relations. Our hope for this roundtable is to spark a discussion about both the topic and the classroom setting—the importance of studying migration then and now and enhancing students’ education in an increasingly global world.
Roundtable IV: Norwegian and Norwegian American Library Resources
Participants: Troy Smith (Nordic Area Reference Librarian Library of Congress)
Hope Reilly (Cataloging and Acquisitions Librarian, Library of Congress)
Christie Ericson (Electronic Resources Librarian and Professor of Library Science, University of Alaska, Anchorage)
This panel discussion will feature three library and information professionals who work specifically with Norwegian and Norwegian American library resources.
Hope Reilly will relate her experience making the national Norwegian collections available to the public by acquiring and cataloging these materials. As part of the Library of Congress’ ongoing effort to modernize subject headings and classification schedules related to indigenous peoples, Reilly will also discuss her office’s role in acquiring and cataloging material by and about the Sámi people in Norway. Along with Troy Smith, Reilly will discuss the process for individuals and institutions to offer Norwegian and Norwegian American items to the Library of Congress as a donation.
Smith will talk about his work selecting Norwegian materials for the national collection, as well as his outreach efforts to make students, educators, and researchers aware of these materials. As an example of Norwegian American materials, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is freely available online and contains scanned Norwegian-language and Norwegian-identity newspapers from the mid-eighteenth to the early-twentieth century. As an example of what Norwegian instructors can do with this database, Smith showed a class of Nordic language students at UC-Berkeley how to search in Chronicling America so that they could find newspapers in their target language for a reading assignment. Since some, but not all, of these newspapers are in Fraktur (a type of Gothic script), this exercise is a good way to introduce Norwegian language students to historical typographies. Smith will also speak to the tangible collections available onsite at the Library of Congress, such as the Huitfeldt-Kaas Collection. Henrik Jørgen Huitfeldt-Kaas (1834-1905) was the state archivist of Norway, and when in 1908 the Library of Congress acquired his library of 5,000 volumes, it was heralded in the Annual Report as the most significant acquisition for that year. In addition to first editions of every work by Ibsen, Bjørnson, and Lie (an incredible achievement in its own right, even at the time), the Huitfeldt-Kaas collection includes long and sometimes even complete runs of important historical and genealogical periodicals, as well as serials in other fields.
Christie Ericson will share her work as a librarian for the Sons of Norway lodge in Anchorage, Alaska, and branch out to discuss the lodge library as an important institution for Norwegian Americana. These libraries can vary from small traveling collections kept in a storeroom or someone’s home and tracked in a spreadsheet, to large collections of thousands of books organized in a dedicated library space, complete with robust automated library systems. Many of these libraries are maintained by dedicated volunteers (often working in a silo, with little to no library expertise) and frequently contain unique materials not found in public or academic library collections. Ericson will discuss the history of Sons of Norway lodge libraries and their importance to the communities they serve. She will also communicate the results of a recent survey of lodge libraries and present ongoing efforts to create a lodge library network.
All presenters look forward to answering any questions from the audience about Norwegian and Norwegian American collections at their respective institutions.