Luther faculty Carrasco and Storlie awarded the H. George Anderson and Jutta F. Anderson endowment

Luther College presented the H. George Anderson and Jutta F. Anderson endowment to Anita Carrasco, Luther associate professor of anthropology, and Rachel Storlie, Luther alumni guest lecturer in music.

The Anderson endowment was established to provide support for junior faculty in their summer development projects. It facilitates research, scholarship and creative and artistic work in a variety of disciplines, contributing to the strong academic integrity of the liberal arts at Luther.

Applicants created proposals that outlined a plan to complete their scholarly work, as well as a timeline of the project’s completion.

Anita Carrasco

In July, Carrasco will travel to the town of Calama, Chile, to complete 12 in-depth interviews with Lila Colamar, an indigenous woman from Caspana. These interviews will complement her research regarding the environmental effects of copper mining, and indigenous peoples in northern Chile.

In completing this research, Carrasco’s hope is to “capture [Colamar’s] life under the ethnographic microscope with the goal of making connections with the larger forces of globalization that came down on the Atacama Desert.”

Carrasco received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano in Santiago, Chile. She went on to receive a Master of Arts in cultural applied anthropology and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Arizona. Previous research of Carrasco’s examined a clash of two cultures, corporations and indigenous peoples in northern Chile, and their battle over water.

Rachel Storlie

While abroad in Europe for an Italian music festival, Storlie visited Croatia and discovered a strong interest in the Croatian language. As an instructor of vocal music, Storlie realized a lack of specific guides for “non-Croatian teachers and singers to learn the nuances of Croatian diction and, therefore, such music is virtually never performed outside of central Europe.”

Storlie will travel this summer to work with professors Eva Kirchmayer-Bilić and Kristina Beck-Kukavčić at the Music Academy of Zagreb. Storlie will study Croatian art songs by Bozidar Kunc and others as she prepares for her 2019 faculty recital, and will share American and Scandinavian songs in exchange with her host country during a concert. She aims to create a working International Phonetic Alphabet guide for Croatian repertoire for usage by students and teachers of singing. In completing this research, Storlie would like to foster “cultural exchange through the undiscovered musical treasure trove that is Croatian art song literature.”

In 2002, Storlie earned an Associate of Applied Sciences in music production from the McNally Smith College of Music. Storlie is a 2010 Luther graduate, with a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a minor in women and gender studies. She went on to obtain a Master of Music in vocal performance from the University of Northern Iowa, where she served as a graduate assistant in vocal accompanying. At Luther, Storlie engages with students through one-on-one applied lessons, leads a weekly voice seminar and accompanies for a colleagues’ seminar. She also co-taught the January Term first-year course, Intro to Opera, in 2018.

A national liberal arts college with an enrollment of 2,050, Luther offers an academic curriculum that leads to the Bachelor of Arts degree in more than 60 majors and pre-professional programs. For more information about Luther visit the college’s website: http://www.luther.edu.