Norwegian-American Essays 2025: Migration, Minorities and Freedom of Religion

Trond Espen Teigen Bjoland is a historian at the Norwegian Public Road Museum. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bergen in 2024 with a dissertation titled “Norwegian-American Identities in Small-Town Wisconsin”. The dissertation, which examines the development of Norwegian-American identities in different types of small towns, finds that local conditions significantly influenced the formation of identities among Norwegian-born migrants and their descendants in the United States. His research interests include local and transnational history, with particular emphasis on topics such as migration, identity, minorities, and transportation. Since 2020, he has served as a board member of NAHA-Norge.

Jørn Brøndal is Professor and Chair of the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He took his Ph.D. degree at the University of Copenhagen in 1999 based on studies in the US enabled by a Fulbright scholarship. He specializes in US political, ethnic and racial history. His book Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics (2004) was named a Wisconsin Historical Society Book of Merit. His Danish-language book on the history of African Americans (2nd revised edition 2020) was among the finalists for two national Danish book awards. His academic output further includes the Danish-language Danske Amerikanere (2020) about Danish migrants in the US. Brøndal is president of the Nordic Association for American Studies (since 2023 and also 2011-13) and sat on the editorial board of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2009-13. Presently, he is a member of the editorial board of American Studies in Scandinavia, a peer-reviewed Nordic journal. Likewise, he is a member of the board of Fulbright Denmark (since 2019). Brøndal frequently discusses US politics and history on Danish TV, radio, and the written press. In 2020, he received SDU’s Research Dissemination Prize.

Knut Djupedal is a retired director at The Norwegian Emigrant Museum and a former president of NAHA-Norway. He was born in Norway and emigrated to the USA with his family in 1955. He was educated in the USA and Norway, and has an M.A. from the University of Oregon and a Magistergrad from the University of Bergen. He has published articles on history and folklore in Norway, the USA, England and Canada, is co-author of Amerikabilder. Den norske vesterheimen 1860-1960 (2008) and author of Nordmenn Bygger i Amerika (2023).

Kari G. Hempel, 1950, former associate professor, taught social studies at the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Stavanger. She has a doctorate in history from the University of Tromsø, 2012, on Norwegian immigrant congregations in the USA. In later published research work, the religious perspective has been central. For many years Hempel was co-author of a six-volume work with farm and family histories from Vindafjord municipality. A book in which the integration process in Norwegian-American and Norwegian-Pakistani religious environments is analyzed, is currently under preparation.

Ann Marie Legreid is Professor Emerita at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where she has also served in academic dean positions. In addition, she is emerita faculty at the University of Central Missouri. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Historical Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her specialties are European and North American geography, cultural and historical geography, and migration studies. Dr. Legreid has been a Fulbright Scholar to Norway and the recipient of the Crown Princess Martha Award from the American Scandinavian Foundation. She has ancestral roots in Hardanger and Hedmark, Norway. 

Miranda Moen is a registered architect and the founder of MO/EN, a regional design and research practice based in Austin, Minnesota. As a material culture researcher, Miranda explores the intersection of immigrant-built structures, cultural identity, and class in shaping rural environments. In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright research fellowship and spent eight months in Norway studying the architectural parallels between vernacular Norwegian architecture and Norwegian-American houses in the Upper Midwest. Since then, her work has focused on demonstrating how buildings preserve and transmit heritage, offering insights into the cultural and historical significance of immigrants’ homeland traditions on the social and physical development of rural areas. She is a board member of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum, Inc. in the US and works as a consultant with the Norwegian Emigrant Museum in Hamar, Norway as a liaison for transnational initiatives.

Daron W. Olson is Professor of History at Indiana University East (United States) and the author of Vikings across the Atlantic: Emigration and the Building of a Greater Norway, 1860-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). He is also the author of several articles, including “Norwegian-American Lutheran Religious Identity during World War II (Norwegian-American Essays, 2020); with Terje H. M. Joranger, “Those Distant Wars: Norwegian-American Attitudes towards Poles and Finns, 1939-1940” (Norwegian-American Studies, 2020); and “His Mother’s Song: The Ethno­landscapes of Norwegian-American Male Visitors to Norway during the 1914 Eidsvoll Centennial” (Norwegian-American Essays, 2017).

Joseph Salmons is the Lester W.J. “Smoky” Seifert Professor of Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He edited Diachronica: International journal for historical linguistics from 2002 until 2019. He is the author of A History of German: What the past reveals about today’s language (Oxford University Press, second edition 2018), Sound Change (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Dialect (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor with Jeroen Darquennes and Wim Vandenbussche of Contact Linguistics (de Gruyter Handbooks, 2021, 2025). Much of his research focuses on language change, especially sound change, and linguistic theory.