• Angela Kueny, Associate Professor of Nursing

    "My early passion in healthcare involved working with diverse populations."

Angela Kueny

Luther Alum Returns to Luther

Kueny graduated from Luther in 2002 and feels the experience helped her see the world through an interdisciplinary lens. “My early passion in healthcare involved working with diverse populations and trying to understand health and illness through my patients’ perspectives,” she says. “From there, I naturally gravitated toward interdisciplinary graduate courses that were focused in both anthropology and nursing.”

After earning her PhD in nursing, with an emphasis on anthropology, she felt it was a natural fit to become a professor, mentor, and teacher working with students learning across disciplines. “A strong component of the liberal arts is to engage ideas from diverse perspectives,” she says. “My work and curiosity in this area will likely never cease, so here I am!”

Two Primary Research Interests

“I hold two main passions right now in research,” Kueny says. “One is to understand cultural meanings of health and illness.” She frequently works with Old Order Amish populations through outreach clinics and research, asking questions about their cultural practices for ill community members. She feels lucky to be able to invite undergraduate students and research assistants to join her in this work.

“Students’ interests have motivated me to conduct research about forgiveness within an Old Order Amish community,” she says. “Our nursing students are applying some of what we learned from the Amish population to teach forgiveness in the school settings in Northeast Iowa.” She hopes this cultural perspective will build mental health in school-age children.

Kueny’s other research interest focuses on supporting nurses to improve care at all levels through evidence-based practice. She’s collaborated with nurses from other institutions to describe nurse managers’ experience implementing evidence-based practice.

“Both of these research areas help me make recommendations for nurses working with diverse populations,” she says. “It really helps them provide high quality care with evidence-based practice, feel supported from their institutional context, and always ask questions with and for patients in order to better serve them.”

Her Study Abroad Course in England

Kueny has taught a community-centered care course in Nottingham, England for nursing students. “Nursing students worked with community health nurses across Nottingham in different districts,” she says. “The highlights of this experience included rich discussions with students comparing a universal healthcare system with our market-based healthcare system.”

Kueny is a member of:

  • Sigma Theta Tau Gamma Chapter (a nursing honor society)
  • Iowa Public Health Association
  • Association of Community Health Nurse Educators

Kueny loves to ski (both downhill and cross country). She gets excited every time it snows since it’s a good reason to get outside and explore the world of winter with her family.