Elizabethtown College News Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
3/18/08
Contact: Mary Dolheimer, director of marketing and media relations, 717-361-1587, dolheimerm@etown.edu
Elizabethtown College named Wheelersburg College Professor of International Studies
ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. – Robert Wheelersburg of Elizabethtown, an anthropologist at Elizabethtown College, has been named College Professor of International Studies, effective July 1.
Wheelersburg earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University in 1980 and a doctorate from Brown University in 1988. He came to Elizabethtown in 1989 and served as assistant dean of the faculty until 1995. For a decade thereafter, he served as chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
Since the time of his doctoral research at Brown, Wheelersburg has been an active international scholar in the Circumpolar region, especially the Scandinavian countries, focusing on the relationship of indigenous peoples to the majority societies that control the nation-states in that region. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Science Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Umea University in Sweden and the Arctic Institute of North America in Canada.
Wheelersburg is also director of Elizabethtown’s Public Archaeology Laboratory, which he founded with a grant from the College’s Fund for Distinction nearly ten years ago. He was also the recipient of a 2007 Collaborative Interdisciplinary Scholarship Program (CISP) grant for international student-faculty research, and he is leading the Mellon faculty international seminar in Iceland and Greenland this year.
“Bob has distinguished himself as a teacher-scholar and as an institutional leader in international studies,” said President Theodore Long. “He is certainly deserving of this high honor, which recognizes his commitment to advance our program of international education in the years ahead.”
Located in southeastern Pennsylvania, Elizabethtown College offers its 1900 students more than 50 academic programs in the liberal arts, sciences and professional studies. Driven by its motto to “Educate for Service,” Elizabethtown centers learning in strong relationships, links classroom instruction with experiential learning, emphasizes international and cross-cultural perspectives and nurtures the capacity for lives of purpose.
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