Elizabethtown College News Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
1/19/06
Contact: Mary Dolheimer, director of marketing and media relations, 717-361-1587, dolheimerm@etown.edu
Elizabethtown College prof named Arctic Visiting Speaker
ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. – Robert Wheelersburg of Elizabethtown, an associate professor and chair of 
sociology/anthropology at Elizabethtown College, was appointed as an Arctic Visiting Speaker by the Arctic Consortium of the United States (ARCUS).
ARCUS is a nonprofit corporation of institutions organized and operated for educational, professional or scientific purposes for conducting research and education in the Arctic. ARCUS is supported primarily by the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs.
In February and March, Wheelersburg will travel to the University of Greenland and the University of Copenhagen to lecture on Saami (Lapp) portrayals in popular media and on the Saami perspective about Swedish compliance with European Community legislation for indigenous resource use rights. Wheelersburg will also teach a lesson in the bachelor-level course “Inuit (Eskimo) Cultures,” providing a comparative perspective of the Saami as an indigenous people of the Arctic.
Wheelersburg earned a doctorate in Arctic studies from Brown University and has worked in the Arctic for nearly 20 years studying indigenous peoples and the loss of traditional resources. He was a Fulbright Scholar twice to Sweden’s University of Umea, at the Center for Arctic Cultural Research and the Department of Saami (Lapp) Studies, where he helped start the Ph.D. program in Arctic studies. Much of his work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science program.
In addition to his main research area of Scandinavia (including the Russian Arctic), Wheelersburg has worked for nearly 15 years on Iceland as a U.S. government representative with the Icelandic Civil Defense Office.
Wheelersburg is currently part of a team of American and Russian researchers studying the role of human dynamics on the ecosystem of the Kola Peninsula of Russia, one of the most populated and polluted regions in the Arctic. The project is initially focusing on the Imandra Lake watersheds, through which pollutants from a population of more than one million and industrial mining flow to the Barents and White seas and the Arctic Ocean. The project (www.aaas.org/international/eca/kola) is being funded by the National Science Foundation.
At Elizabethtown College -- central Pennsylvania’s premier small, comprehensive college -- 1800 men and women enjoy personal attention, breadth of curriculum, experiential learning and a commitment to serving others. Elizabethtown has been ranked for 12 consecutive years by “U.S. News and World Report” as one of the top comprehensive colleges in the North.
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