Ellen Knutson

Ellen Knutson is a Portland, Oregon, based project manager of Practicing Democracy: Voter Education and Engagement on Campus at AASCU’s American Democracy Project. She is an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois and at North Carolina Central University where she teaches courses on community engagement and international librarianship in their online master’s programs. Formerly, she was a research associate at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation where she was a key member of the research team comprising Russian and U.S. colleagues developing libraries as centers for public dialogue and deliberation. As co-chair of the Russia-U.S. Library Dialogue, she has participated in the Dartmouth Conference. At Kettering, Knutson also worked with college and university faculty members at minority-serving schools who want to include elements of civic engagement in their teaching and research, and who want to encourage their students to become more civically engaged.