Katie Corner, Staff Writer–
An online career placement test once told her she should be a bartender or a philosophy professor. At the time, Dr. Kelsi Morrison-Atkins was working in a brewery. Now, she’s a professor of religion at Denison University.
And while the test predicted the wrong field of academia, its results are just accurate enough to be a little eerie.
When Dr. Kelsi Morrison-Atkins, “Dr. Kelsi” to her students, was a kid, she didn’t know being a professor was a path to consider. Growing up in Fairmont, Indiana, home of James Dean and Garfield the cat, Morrison-Atkins was the first in her family to go to college. She attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she studied religion and English.
As she neared graduation, her hunger for learning was not yet satiated, and a beloved academic advisor recommended she pursue a master’s degree.
“I almost laughed him out of the room,” Morrison-Atkins said.
She applied anyway, partially to prove that she wouldn’t get into the prestigious programs he suggested. But her plan backfired when she was admitted to Harvard Divinity School. She said to herself, “Well, I guess I’m doing this!” and moved out of Indiana for the first time in her life.
She earned a master’s degree in New Testament and Early Christian Studies but didn’t stop there. Kelsi went on to get a doctorate in theology while at Harvard, completing her dissertation on Biblical clothing and identity.
“I wanted to study everything and I couldn’t do that, so I chose religion because it’s the closest thing to it,” Morrison-Atkins said.
Morrison-Atkins joined Denison’s religion department in the fall of 2022 and felt an immediate “click” with the community in her first interview. Her colleagues, who also are her neighbors in Granville, are friendly and curious, creating an environment where students and faculty can ask big questions. The dogs who accompany several professors in the department are a bonus, too.
Morrison-Atkins loves that she has the freedom to teach basically anything she wants. Her enthusiasm is well-suited for a job that feeds her relentless curiosity. Her ever-changing interests are largely inspired by what her students are excited about. Manuscripts, forgery, textiles, storytelling and museum artifacts are her current fixations.
Each semester, in addition to her signature course, “Bible, Gender, and Sexuality,” Morrison-Atkins gets to craft up to three new classes aligned with her curiosities and those of her students. “Game Planning,” a brand new course, is a tedious balance of finding enough good material without overloading the syllabus.
But for Morrison-Atkins, being an effective professor doesn’t just mean what you teach, but how you teach it. In the classroom, she works hard to be transparent about her own opinions while being sensitive to the different lived experiences of her students. She makes an effort to give everyone the opportunity to speak and respond in a meaningful way. And every single day, she has students “Move In”—a practice where students share with one another what’s on their mind, about the previous night’s reading or anything at all.
“If your teaching model is to show up and give information for students to regurgitate it back to you, you’re not really doing anything transformative. And I hope to be transformative, mostly because I get bored otherwise if I don’t feel like I’m doing something that matters,” Morrison-Atkins said.
Her favorite things about Dension have been the relationships she builds with her students, which she says are unlike the connections at her past teaching jobs. The mix of personalities and majors that come together to take her courses creates a special “energy” in the classroom—one she wishes she could bottle up.
“Everyone has a lot of questions, but everyone trusts one another to feel safe asking them. It’s a really beautiful thing,” Morrison-Atkins said.
When she’s is not in professor mode, you’ll find Morrison-Atkins hiking with her partner in the Bio Reserve, doing fiber arts of some kind, or reading a fantasy novel, curled up with her dog, Diane, and her cat, Lola. This past fall, she led “Session Zero,” a Denison orientation program in Mohican State Park, where her group of first-year students played Dungeons and Dragons for days on end.
“I’m really just a nerd, inside and out,” Morrison-Atkins said.
But she feels she can be herself at Denison, nerdiness and all. And for that, she is very grateful.
Editor’s Note: The professor spotlight is a recurring feature. Email [email protected] if you would like to suggest a professor to be featured.