Category: Academics

Five Luther College seniors attended the annual Sigma Tau Delta Convention in St. Louis from April 3–6. The students, all English majors or minors and members of the Sigma Tau Delta English honor society, presented work on topics like George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and queer identity in literature, in addition to original fiction and poetry. 

Beginning with the cohort entering in fall 2024, Luther College nursing students will spend their senior year working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, rather than their junior year, to ease the transition into professional nursing after graduation. 

Grace Lawrence, a senior at Luther College, is majoring in social work because she wants to help vulnerable populations. She’s spending her last semester in Washington, D.C., learning more about the social work field through an internship.

More than 500 Luther students made the Dean’s List for the Fall 2023 semester.

Elizabeth Steding, Luther College professor of German, published GDR Literature in German Curricula and Textbooks: Exploring the Legacy of GDR Authors, 1985-2015. “I have been intrigued by the GDR since I was in college, and textbooks play an important role in my life as a teacher, so this project really combines two interests of mine,” said Steding.

Luther College student Clara Wodny, class of 2024, won a $2,000 Study Abroad Scholarship from Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society. Wodny is currently studying away at the University of Nottingham in England.

The new Luther College curriculum includes fewer required credits and gives students more flexibility to pursue their interests and passions within their Luther education. It also fulfills the college’s goals to provide a more skills-based curriculum.

“At Luther, we have a long tradition of preparing students for a future in the various disciplines of engineering,” said Todd K. Pedlar, professor of physics. “In our new program, we’ll serve such students even more completely.”

Luther College is one of a select group of private liberal arts colleges in the United States with a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most respected undergraduate honors organization. 

The Austrian-American Educational Commission has selected Luther College senior Joshua Hartl of Oskaloosa, Iowa, as a U.S. Teaching Assistant (USTA) in Austria for the 2023-24 academic year.