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
Former Eckerd College Trustee and Founder of the Nielsen Center
The Nielsen Center was launched in 2021 by a generous gift from Helmar Nielsen, a beloved Eckerd College Trustee, serving from 1994-2021, and it has been endowed in perpetuity as an expression of the donor’s unwavering support for the ideal of liberal arts education in the small college context.
Mr. Nielsen envisioned the liberal arts as a process of cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual growth—for students and faculty alike. Thus, the Nielsen Center embodies the founder’s belief that the liberal arts requires a unique and intentional collaboration among faculty across disciplines, as well as careful and sustained attention to the purposes and varied processes of student learning in the liberal arts tradition. Through his gift, Helmar Nielsen supports the excellence and continued resilience of liberal arts colleges, both at Eckerd and across the United States.
More about Helmar Nielsen (1936-2024)
A retired executive and entrepreneur, 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, he continued to seek ways to promote Eckerd College in its innovative approach to the liberal arts.
Beyond his signature gift of the Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts, Mr. Nielsen has supported the College in numerous other ways, funding endowed professorships, scholarships, and programs in various areas 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, board members, alumni and students, and as a member of the Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College (part of the College’s lifelong learning community) he was a regular presence at events, lectures, and receptions on campus over the years.
Helmar Nielsen’s belief in the priceless value of education extends beyond Eckerd: he is a former Trustee of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, and the Morehouse School of Religion, as well as a supporter of William Jewell College, where he began his own life-changing intellectual journey.
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 2001 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.
