Dr. Vicki Szabo, author of Monstrous Fishes and the Mead Dark Sea (Brill 2008), is an associate professor of ancient, medieval, and environmental history at Western Carolina University. Her current research focuses on interdisciplinary reconstruction of medieval Norse exploitation of marine mammals through archaeology, history and ancient DNA analysis. Funded by a National Science Foundation Arctic Social Sciences grant, Dr. Szabo and a team of collaborators and students conduct research in archives, excavations and labs in Iceland, Greenland, Scotland and across the Subarctic and North Atlantic. She has also received funding from the Fulbright Foundation, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the AAAS, and the American Philosophical Society. She is also working on a monograph for Routledge publishers, focusing on medieval and early modern wildlife.