Our faculty are passionate about learning—and not just student learning. They are dedicated learners and scholars, and that shines through in the classroom and in the field. And they’re more than just teachers. They are mentors who often establish life-long relationships with their students.
Northland College faculty shape the ways in which you see the world, opening your mind to new ideas and ways of thinking. They’ll help you foster connections that prepare you for graduate studies, a successful career path, and a meaningful life after graduation.
with Angela Stroud
This is a wholly original sociology course, exploring the importance of place, deep connections, social justice, and what we’ll need in the face of climate change. Stroud constructed the course from the ground up because no textbook existed. “I have come to firmly believe that we don’t just need community now, we’re going to desperately need it in the future, as our systems become less stable and life becomes much less predictable,” Stroud says.
with Jennifer Kuklenski
Called “intellectually stimulating” by students, this business class goes beyond the typical “green” marketing strategies employed by organizations, challenges environmental business practices, and integrates strategies into the marketing plan that seek to shape the conservation ethic of an organization’s individual members and their communities.
with Alan Brew
A unique, experiential English course that combines literary study with wilderness fieldwork. In the classroom, you’ll read wilderness literature that includes works of Sigurd F. Olson. Then in May, you’ll travel to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness where you’ll have two weeks on the trail to read, write, discuss, paddle, and portage.
with Gina Kirsten
Through essays, guest speakers, field trips, and in-class cooking, this hands-on English class looks at the role food and agriculture have played, and will play, in human life. Exploring current and historical perceptions on the consumption of food, those who work to provide it, and how cultural, political, and economic attitudes and policies influence what and how we eat. This course is also an elective in our sustainable agriculture minor.
with Scott Grinnell
Prof Grinnell wrote the book for this sustainable community development course, integrating principles of green building with renewable energy systems. You’ll apply classroom ideas with your own creative visions to create dynamic design projects addressing environmentally-sound buildings and an array of renewable energy opportunities and applications. “My goal is to help students feel empowered to address future challenges, particularly climate change,” Grinnell says.
with Peter Annin
This course delves into the history of political maneuvers and water diversion schemes that have proposed sending Great Lakes water everywhere from Akron to Arizona. Using a case-study approach that examines these various water projects, the course culminates with a focus on the Great Lakes Compact, a legal document designed to keep Great Lakes water inside the Great Lakes Basin. This class is an elective in our water science major.
with Todd Rothe
Explore the components of a sustainable farm enterprise within an environmentally-conscious, business-management context. This class includes active observation and hands-on learning through community partnerships and campus gardens, covering aspects of meat, fruit, and vegetable production techniques within both scale-appropriate and ecosystem-based models. Our commitment to regional sustainability, from the production of food to its distribution and consumption, is a source of pride for students, faculty, staff, and the local community—this course is a perfect complement to our sustainable agriculture minor.
Diversity and Organizational Development: Impacts and Opportunities
Jennifer Kuklenski
As modern societies become more diverse, the call for greater inclusion within organizations is getting louder. Many organizations have rushed to diversify, without fully understanding the implicit and explicit levels of diversity, the complexity of social identities, and the hidden and often unintended ways differences between members of in-groups and out-groups can lead to social exclusion. Diversity and Organizational Development helps current and future leaders develop their diversity competency.
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, EnvironmentSustainable Food Production
Kyle Bladow, Jennifer Ladino, eds.
Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism proposes that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience.
The Great Lakes Water Wars, 2nd Edition
Peter Annin
Peter Annin writes a fast-paced account of the people and stories behind the upcoming battles facing our great lakes. Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past-and future-of this unique resource.
The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear
Brian Tochterman
As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press–representations. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials used this fear of death to press for a new urban vision.
Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry
Angela Stroud
Despite increasing opportunities for gun owners to carry concealed firearms in public places, we know little about what a publicly armed citizenry means for society. Stroud’s interview subjects usually first insist that a gun is simply a tool for protection, but she shows how much more the license represents: possessing a concealed firearm is a practice shaped by race, class, gender, and cultural definitions that separate “good guys” from those who represent threats.
Introductory Fisheries Analyses with R
Derek H. Ogle
Introductory Fisheries Analyses with R provides detailed instructions on performing basic fisheries stock assessment analyses in the R environment. Accessible to practicing fisheries scientists as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the book demonstrates the flexibility and power of R, offers insight into the reproducibility of script-based analyses, and shows how the use of R leads to more efficient and productive work in fisheries science.
Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America
Erica Hannickel
The lush, sun-drenched vineyards of California evoke a romantic, agrarian image of winemaking, though in reality the industry reflects American agribusiness at its most successful. Empire of Vines traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in California—a progression that illustrates viticulture’s centrality to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion and the formation of a national culture.
