Circumpolar Observatory

Frank J. Feeley is a zooarchaeologist and PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Despite a life-long distrust of any fish not breaded and fried, his dissertation research focuses primarily on the origins and development of the burgeoning medieval commercial cod industry. His field work has centered on the farm of Gufuskálar in Western Iceland where during the 15th century the site produced a dried fish product for Continental import. The fishing station was large and productive potentially signaling a controversial shift in Icelandic economic ideals from domestic rurality towards transnational capitalism. While Frank is interested in this overlap between environmental capital and social change he is most excited by the potential for these datasets to better assist modern fisheries scientists and managers in maintaining sustainable wild fish resources by extending their available fish population datasets deep into the past.

Viðar Hreinsson grew up on a farm in Northern Iceland and completed a Mag. Art degree in literary studies at the University of Copenhagen in 1989. Former director of the Reykjavík Academy, he is an independent literary scholar and environmental activist currently based at the Stefansson Arctic Institute, the Reykjavik Academy and the Icelandic Museum of Natural History. Viðar has taught and lectured on Icelandic literary and cultural history at universities in Canada, the USA and Scandinavia and has published a number of scholarly papers. He is the General Editor of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders I-V (1997). His two-volume biography of Icelandic Canadian poet Stephan G. Stephansson, published in Iceland 2002 and 2003, appeared in English in one volume as Wakeful Nights (2012). Both versions received nominations and awards. His latest work is a 760 p. monograph, Jón lærði og náttúrur náttúrunnar (Jón the Learned and the Natures of Nature, 2016) on the 17th century conception of nature and the life of Jón Guðmundsson the Learned (1574-1658), a self-educated scholar, historian, poet, rebel, magician, healer and artist. It was nominated for the Icelandic Literary Award, and received the special award for academic work of outstanding quality from Hagþenkir, the Assocation of Icelandic Non-fiction Writers. Presently Viðar is working on various projects within environmental humanities and cultural sustainability, including the international transdisciplinary research project Reflections of Change: The Natural World in Literary and Historical Sources from Iceland ca. AD 800 to 1800 (2017-2020) funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Ingrid Mainland is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the UHI Archaeology Institute, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research has two major themes: sustainability, using environmental data to address long term trajectories of human-environment relations and societal resilience in N. Atlantic island ecosystems; and, palaeodiet, providing new insights into the impact of grazing animals on the landscapes of the N. Atlantic islands, the impact of early Neolithic herding strategies in Southern Europe and pig domestication in Eurasia. Her recent projects include Orkney Gateway to the Atlantic: Landscapes of Change – Medieval to Modern settlement at Skaill and Brough, Rousay. This interdisciplinary field project undertaken in collaboration with the University of Bradford excavations at Swandro is using a combination of archive research, landscape survey, building recording, and sample excavation as an investigative tool to explore how the early medieval estate at Westness has developed from the late first millennium to the present. She was also awarded a British Academy mid-career fellowship (2014-15) for ‘Herding economies, sustainability and resilience in Viking and Norse Orkney’, exploring the role of Norse herding economies in underpinning societal sustainability through gift-giving, feasting and the emerging long distance trade networks in commodities of the Early Medieval period.

Gísli Pálsson is a landscape archaeologist based in Sweden. His expertise is in geographical information science, archaeoinformatics and remote sensing. He is currently researching the role of resource exchange networks on land use in Medieval and early modern Iceland. His project, Storied Lines: tracing the tendrils of agency across Iceland’s historic landscape can be found at http://jardabok.com.

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.

Felix Riede is Professor MSO in Environmental Humanities, Aarhus University. Born in Germany, educated in Durham (BA) and Cambridge (MPhil and PhD). Formerly Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. Felix is former Head (2015-2018) of the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies and now convener of the Materials, Culture and Heritage Research Programme and Director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities all at Aarhus University. His work focuses on human-environment relations in a deep historical perspective – especially in the Palearctic – and with many collaborations across the biological and geological sciences. Felix is also associated with the Arctic Research Center and is a core member of BIOCHANGE: Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World at AU.