About Us
Founded in 2021 through a generous gift from Helmar Nielsen, The Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts at Eckerd College hosts sustained small group conversations among faculty teaching at small liberal arts colleges.
The Nielsen Center honors faculty for their commitment to teaching and the liberal arts. Workshops are designed to create a hospitable, retreat-like space of abundance and aesthetic excellence — providing a revitalizing respite from the culture of scarcity and competition that pervades in the academy today.
Goals of the Center
- To support and develop faculty committed to exploring the vocation of liberal arts teaching and learning
- To support and develop the teaching effectiveness of faculty at small liberal arts colleges
- To strengthen and sustain high quality liberal arts education in small American colleges
Eckerd College
The Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts confirms the abiding commitment of Eckerd College to liberal arts teaching and learning. For more than 60 years Eckerd College has been challenging students to “think outside” on our 188-acre campus along Tampa Bay.
Helmar Nielsen
Retired Eckerd College Trustee and Founder of the Nielsen Center
A generous gift from Helmar Nielsen has endowed the Center in perpetuity—an expression of his unwavering support of liberal arts education as a process of cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual growth for students and faculty alike. The Center expresses his belief that the liberal arts requires a unique and intentional collaboration between faculty across the disciplines, as well as careful and sustained attention to the purposes and varied processes of student learning in the liberal arts tradition. Helmar Nielsen is dedicated to the continued resilience and excellence of liberal arts colleges.
A retired executive, Helmar Nielsen joined the Eckerd College Board of Trustees in 1994 and has served the College with his time and generosity ever since. Even after his retirement from the Board in 2021, Nielsen has continued to seek ways to put Eckerd on the map for its innovative approach to the liberal arts.
More about Helmar Nielsen
Helmar Nielsen has funded endowed professorships, scholarships, and programs in various areas at the College, including film studies, the humanities, science and technology, spiritual life, ethics, and faculty development. The Helmar and Enole Nielsen Center for Visual Arts, which opened at Eckerd in 2018, is named for Nielsen and his daughter.
Through his long-time leadership of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board, Helmar came to know many faculty members. Helmar is a member of the Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College (part of the College’s lifelong learning community) and has attended numerous events, lectures, and receptions on campus over the years.
Helmar’s belief in the value of education extends beyond Eckerd: he is a former Trustee of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, the Morehouse School of Religion, and also supports William Jewell College, where he began his own college journey.
Thomas Pearson
Coordinator of the Nielsen Center
Currently in his fourth year of work with the Nielsen Center, Tom is an anthropologist of American religious cultures with a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Tom taught at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and for nearly twenty years was Associate Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion – an organization located on the Wabash College campus and funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc. to support faculty teaching religious and theological studies through workshops, grants, and resources.
Tom is the author of Missions and Conversions: Creating the Montagnard-Dega Refugee Community (Palgrave, 2009), an analysis of missionary rhetorics adopted by anthropologists and the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
Under Tom’s 15 year editorship, the international peer-reviewed journal, Teaching Theology & Religion developed a signature genre of scholarship on teaching and learning in higher education.
Julienne H. Empric
Executive Director of the Nielsen Center
Professor of Literature at Eckerd College
Julie Empric is Professor of Literature specializing in Early Modern English and in Irish Literature. In addition, she has for more than two decades co-directed Eckerd College’s Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLCs)—monthly gatherings where faculty across disciplines and generations convene to explore the challenges and opportunities of teaching undergraduates, and to address pressing issues emerging in higher education across the U.S. She is a graduate of Nazareth College of Rochester (then a small liberal arts college), York University, Toronto (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (Ph.D.), and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She has served Eckerd in various administrative capacities, most recently as Interim VPAA and Dean of Faculty (2022-23). Her areas of teaching and research include English and Irish literature, the history of drama, children’s literature, literature and law, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Since 2021 she has regularly led seminars on Law and Literature for Federal and State Judges’ Conferences across the nation. She is the recipient of multiple outstanding teaching and leadership recognitions from organizations such as C.A.S.E. (The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education), the Regional South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and Eckerd College.
