The Artists, Scholars, & Innovators Lecture Series, hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning, is presented by award-winning faculty with artistic, scholarly, or innovative achievements. Please see below for information about upcoming presentations.
Fall 2024 Lecture:
A World Perilous and Beautiful: The Life of Sigrid Undset
Presented by
Dr. Laura Michele Diener
Professor in the Department of History
2023-2024 Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award Recipient
Thursday, September 26, 2024 | 4-5 pm | Drinko Library 402*
*Attend virtually via Teams: Click here to join the meeting
Abstract:
This talk will introduce the audience to the willful and passionate life of Sigrid Undset, one of Norway’s most beloved novelists. Born to an adventurous couple in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Sigrid grew up in a world poised for radical change—she would experience the Norwegian independence movement and women’s suffrage as well as the horrors of the two world wars. Her unconventional choices often shocked those who loved her—from her engagement to a married painter with three children, to her divorce, to her deeply controversial conversion to Catholicism. Self-educated and impoverished for much of her youth, she nevertheless forged a career as a novelist, and by the mid-1920’s, became an internationally- bestselling author due to her acclaimed Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy, which recounts the tumultuous life of a medieval woman who died during the Black Death. Sigrid won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and today remains one of only seventeen women holding the prize. Laura Michele Diener’s biography of Sigrid Undset is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press.
If you have questions about ASI lectures, please email ctl@marshall.edu.