Courses and Workshops

This course is based on archival research Berkeley professor Linda Rugg has been carrying out in Philadelphia, Wilmington (Delaware), Stockholm, Uppsala, and Dalarna (in Sweden) for the past several years.

It all started when she was visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was captivated by two extraordinary portraits from 1735. They were Lenape men, the only portraits of Native Americans in a long corridor of portraits of colonists, and the accompanying labels identified the painter as an “American, born in Sweden.” There was no Swedish immigration to America during the 1700s as far as she was aware, and so a cascade of questions started her down this research path: “Who was the painter, and why and how did he come to America in the 1700s?” “Who were the men in the portraits, and how did they come to be painted?” “Who commissioned the portraits?”

As she started to look for answers to these questions, she found that the painter had come to America with his brother, a pastor sent by a Bishop of the Swedish Church to serve the Swedish congregations settled in the Delaware River Valley. And the pastor had written a diary of his experiences in America.

Faculty Bio

Linda Haverty Rugg is a professor in Berkeley’s Scandinavian Department. She has taught OLLI courses on Ingmar Bergman, crime fiction, saga literature, eco criticism, and Mark Twain. She is also a recipient of OLLI’s “Distinguished Teaching Award.” She received her undergraduate degree with departmental honors in English and German from Barnard College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. 

This is a Best of OLLI Subscription Course

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Member Praise for Linda Rugg

Linda Rugg is such an engaging instructor, and she has a deep passion ... that invigorated all of us.

Dr. Rugg is an exceptionally gifted teacher. She is brilliant, funny and down to earth. The class exceeded all expectations

Faculty Q&A

• Read an interview with Linda Rugg from our archive.