Dr. Inger Marie Okkenhaug, a historian and associate professor of international history at Volda University College, will present a paper based on her research on the Norwegian missionary, nurse and relief worker Bodil Jiorn and her experiences helping Armenian refugees during and after World War I at the 2012 Justice Lecture on Tuesday, March 27.
Dr. Inger Marie Okkenhaug
Free and open to the public, the Justice Lecture will be given at 5 p.m. in Room 100, McNeely Hall.
Okkenhaug has studied Armenian genocide and the events leading up to and including World War I, when a number of single Scandinavian women, professionally trained as nurses or teachers, left for Turkish Armenia with religious, professional and humanitarian callings. Once on the ground in Armenia, the women became important eyewitnesses to atrocities and were active in the Armenian population’s fight for survival.
Okkenhaug received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Bergen in Norway, where she also worked as a researcher from 2000 to 2010. In addition to a number of published chapters and articles, she is the author of The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavour and Adventure: Anglican Mission, Women and Education in Palestine, 1888-1948 (2002), and has co-edited Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East (2008), and Protestant Mission and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2011) Brill.
