Bruce Dalgaard Chapel Talk Feb. 20

Bruce Dalgaard, economics professor at Carleton College and former professor at St. Olaf College, will be speaking at the NRC Chapel on Thursday, February 20, at 3:30 p.m. His presentation will be on Hans Nielsen Hauge (Norway) and John Wesley (England), two Christian leaders of the 1700s who put their faith into practice by helping out those less financially fortunate.

Scandinavian scholars and Dalgaard are doing research on these two spiritual and financial giants because they believe that their wisdom in matters of faith and finance is sorely needed today.

Bruce Dalgaard is a native of Illinois. He began his professional life as a high school teacher in suburban Chicago before returning to his alma mater, the University of Illinois, to complete a masters and Ph.D. in economics. His first university position was at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

Dalgaard came to Minnesota in 1980, assuming a position at the University of Minnesota. He rose quickly through the ranks and was awarded full professorship within six years. In 1990–91, he and his wife, Carol Korda, went to Japan where Dalgaard was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Chiba University outside Tokyo. That was a formative year for the two of them.  They decided to change their lifestyle by moving from St. Paul to Northfield. Dalgaard was appointed Husby-Johnson Professor of Business and Economics at St. Olaf College in 1992. He would remain at St. Olaf for 20 years.

While at St. Olaf, Dalgaard, usually with Carol accompanying him, led seven St. Olaf student groups on interim abroad experiences. He spent a term teaching in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, the two returned to Japan in 1997–98 when Dalgaard served as Resident Director of the Japan Study Program at Waseda University. Dalgaard teaches every summer at an international summer school in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Dalgaard retired from St. Olaf in 2012 and was immediately hired by Carleton College where he was named Benedict Distinguish Visiting Professor of Economics. He now teaches part-time at Carleton and part-time in Oslo, Norway, where he has helped develop and launch a new school of management inspired by the work of Hans Nielsen Hauge.

With a wide range of academic interests, Dalgaard has written/edited four books and dozens of scholarly articles. In the last six years, his primary focus has been on Norway, especially on the interaction between religion and economic development. He was a Leif Ericksen Visiting Scholar at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. It was there that he developed a working relationship with several Norwegian academics, leading to research and publications and the founding of the Hauge School of Management.