Background
Agnes Mathilde Wergeland was born in Christiania (Oslo), Norway, the daughter of Sverre Nicolai and Anne Margrete (Larsen) Wergeland. The Wergeland family has produced many statesmen, writers, and artists, and the name is one of the greatest in Norway.
Education
From childhood Agnes Wergeland nurtured an intense love for the studious life - for science, art, literature, history, and philosophy. She was richly endowed with musical and artistic talent; she studied music with Grieg and won high praise from him; her most casual note-book sketches reveal great natural abilities. She attended a school for young ladies in Christiania in 1879, and then, four years later, she took up the study of old Norse and Icelandic law under the illustrious Germanist and jurist Konrad Mauer, in Munich, Germany. After two years she went to the University of Zürich where she completed her studies in 1890, with the distinction of having been the first woman Norwegian to receive a Ph. D. from that university.
Career
The offer of a fellowship in history at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa. , brought her to the United States in 1890. She remained at the college for two more years, giving lectures in the history of art, and then lectured at the University of Illinois in 1893. From 1896 to 1902 she was a docent in history at the University of Chicago, and acted as a non-resident instructor from 1902 to 1908. The greatest professional opportunity of her life came, however, when she was offered the chairmanship of the department of history in the University of Wyoming in 1902. Here, in the first state to adopt woman's suffrage, she exercised freely her genuine teaching abilities and pursued her scholarly interests unhampered by the prevalent prejudices against women in institutions of higher learning. Here, finally, the bitter memory of her "starvation period" as a student on the Continent and of the years when her divergent intellectual interests stamped her as a "queer foreigner" in the earlier conventional American women's college faded into the background, and her industrious and highly trained mind turned to scholarly production. In 1912 she published Amerika' og Andre Digte, and in 1914 Efterladte Digte. In 1916, the History of the Working Classes in France, Leaders in Norway and Other Essays, Slavery in Germanic Society during the Middle Ages, and Early Christian Romanesque and Gothic Architecture were published posthumously. She also contributed to the periodicals: North American Review, Dial, American Architect, and Journal of Political Economy. Her literary accomplishments in English and German as well as in her native language were remarkable. In 1904 she became a citizen of the United States. She remained in Wyoming until her death at Laramie, where she is buried. As a memorial to her, a $5, 000 endowment fund was presented to the Royal Frederik's University at Christiania, to enable Norwegian women students to study history and economics in the United States. A scholarship in history was also given to the University of Wyoming in her honor.