Janet Schrunk Ericksen Is the New Chancellor of the University of Minnesota Morris

Janet Schrunk Ericksen was appointed the seventh chancellor of the University of Minnesota Morris. She has been serving as acting chancellor.

The University of Minnesota Morris, not far from where Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota all meet, enrolls just under 1,300 students, according to the most recent federal data. Women make up 57 percent of the student body.

“It’s an amazing institution on a beautiful campus, one that provides an extraordinary college education and experience, with academic excellence and abundant enrichment opportunities open not to a few elite students but to all students,” said Dr. Ericksen. “I can’t imagine a university with a mission and purpose I could embrace more fully than that at UMN Morris. I know I have a lot of work to do — we have a lot of work to do — but I firmly believe we can together make the future better.”

A scholar of medieval literature, Dr. Ericksen began her career at the university in 1998 as an assistant professor of English. Since then she has held a variety of administrative roles, including vice chancellor for academic affairs and dean, director of the Honors Program, chair of the Division of the Humanities, and interim chair of the Division of the Social Sciences. She is the author of Reading Old English Biblical Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Chancellor Ericksen holds a bachelor’s degree in English and art history from the University of Kansas. She earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a specialization in early medieval English and Old Norse literature.