Orm Øverland

Garbės daktaras / Honorary Doctor (Suteiktas vardas 2007-02-21)

Orm Øverland, a professor at the University of Bergen, a renowned literary and migration historian, and a well-known reformer of the higher education system in Europe, was awarded an honorary doctorate by VMU in 2007. Professor Øverland was one of the initiators of the cooperation agreement between Vytautas Magnus University and the University of Bergen, signed in 1992, and was a frequent visitor to VMU from 1994, where he gave lectures to students and faculty.

Orm Øverland was born and raised in Oslo, where he also studied, worked, and earned his cand.philol. degree in English Philology. He received his doctorate from Yale University. From 1970 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2005, he was a professor at the University of Bergen, visited more than 30 universities in ten countries across Europe, America, and Asia to give lectures and for other academic purposes, and was awarded five distinguished fellowships and prestigious prizes. Orm Øverland became a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1994 and served on the editorial boards of many Norwegian and international organisations and international journals. His academic career spanned more than 20 different positions, ranging from Head of Department to Dean, and from consultant to higher education institutions in Sweden, Croatia, and Romania, to Chairman of the Norwegian National Committee for Higher Education.

His rich and varied institutional activities were exceeded by his numerous and valuable publications. Prof. Øverland authored five books, co-authored one, published eight, and co-edited eight others. He published 106 articles in books and journals, 72 reviews, and as many as 315 articles in newspapers. His areas of interest included English philology, American studies in Scandinavia, and American immigration history. He also published extensively on emigration and immigration, as well as on Lithuanian-American culture and literature.

On his initiative, VMU established contacts in the early years of its re-establishment, and in 1992, VMU signed a cooperation agreement with the University of Bergen. Professor Orm Øverland chaired the coordinating committee of the cooperation programme until 2005. The Department of Foreign Languages, and particularly English Philology, was most closely associated with the University of Bergen, where VMU teachers and graduates studied in various master’s programmes. Since 1995, VMU has also been involved in doctoral programmes. Such fruitful cooperation was a special merit of Prof. Orm Øverland. At his initiative, other departments of the University of Bergen, including the Department of German Philology, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Department of Comparative Politics, and the Emigration Institute, also began to cooperate with VMU.

Based on information provided by VMU Library.