FACULTY - Brie Swenson Arnold
Assistant Professor
Studying history will make you a wonderful writer, an incisive reader, a skilled researcher and investigator, and a sophisticated analytical thinker. These are skills that are transferable to any occupation and any experience in life. History is also fascinating because it focuses on enduring human questions and concerns. Everyone and everything has a history. The past was populated by many different people who held to a variety of beliefs, ideas, opinions, and goals. Their actions and non-actions affected how things turned out today, just as actions in our lifetimes will very much influence the future.
At Augsburg, I teach courses in early and nineteenth-century American history, specifically the introductory courses America to 1815 and Nineteenth-Century U.S. History, and upper-division courses in African American history, Minnesota history, slavery, and the Civil War.
I am interested in the history of slavery, the Civil War era, and American women's and gender history. In particular, my research centers on issues of gender and race in the nineteenth-century United States. My dissertation, titled “'Competition for the Virgin Soil of Kansas': Gendered and Sexualized Discourse about the Kansas Crisis in Northern Popular Print and Political Culture, 1854-1860,” argued that gendered political discourse in popular literature played a critical role in changing northern public opinion and political decision-making in the crisis over slavery that led to the Civil War.
I have presented numerous papers at local and national conferences, including the Annual Meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and have received numerous research grants and awards.
When I'm not at Augsburg, I enjoy working with K-12 history education (including Minnesota History Day and guest lecturing in area high schools), watching movies, cooking, and spending time with my new baby.
