Geographer, adventurer, environmental educator, and 2017 National Geographic Emerging Explorer, M Jackson studies and writes about glaciers and climate change. M earned a doctorate from the University of Oregon in geography and glaciology, where she examined how climate change transformed people and ice communities in Iceland. A veteran U.S. Fulbright Scholar in both Turkey and Iceland, M currently serves as a U.S. Fulbright Ambassador. M holds a Masters of Science degree from the University of Montana, where she focused on climate change and Alaskan glaciers. M served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia, and is a nationally registered emergency medical technician with extensive experience “in search and rescue, firefighting, and removing cats from trees” in Southeast Alaska. M has worked for more than ten years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory guiding backcountry trips and exploring glacial systems. Her 2015 book While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change weaves together the parallel stories of what happens when the climates of a family and a planet change. More recently she is the author of The Secret Lives of Icelandic Glaciers (2018). She is currently working on In Tangible Ice, a multi-year project examining the socio-physical dimensions of glacier retreat in near-glacier communities within all eight circumpolar nations. M has led National Geographic Student Expeditions programs in Alaska and Iceland. In 2018 she was named a TED fellow.

Jón Haukur Ingimundarson is senior scientist at the Stefansson Arctic Institute and associate professor of anthropology and arctic studies at the University of Akureyri. With a PhD in cultural anthropology and social history from the University of Arizona (1995), Jón Haukur Ingimundarson is deputy director at the Stefansson Arctic Institute. His research interests include the political ecology of medieval to early modern Iceland, as well as present-day arctic human development, agriculture, food security and impacts of globalization and climate change. Jón Haukur is co-leader of the project Arctic Youth and Sustainable Futures, research partner in the REXSAC Nordic Centre of Excellence and the EU-Horizon 2020 project NUNATARYUK, and Co-PI of 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. Jón Haukur was Congress Convener of the 7th Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS VII, Akureyri 2011) and among the lead organizers of the conference Gender Equality in the Arctic: Current Realities, Future Challenges (Akureyri, 2014), sponsored by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Arctic Council. In addition to teaching courses in anthropology, ethnographic methods and polar law, Jón Haukur is coordinator for the undergraduate arctic studies courses that are delivered at University of Akureyri under the auspices of the University of the Arctic, from which he received the biennial Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011.

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.

Hans Husyan Harmsen is an Archaeologist and Curator at the Greenland National Museum and Archives in Nuuk, Greenland. He completed his PhD from the University at Buffalo’s Department of Anthropology in 2017 with a focus on exploring prehistoric human responses to environmental change along the southeast coast of Sri Lanka and has participated in numerous NSF-funded archaeological projects across the circumpolar North in places such as Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands and Sweden. He is the former Associate Director of the University at Buffalo’s Social Systems GIS Laboratory and still connected to UB’s Department of Anthropology as a Research Assistant Professor. Hans is also currently a Guest Lecturer at Ilisimatusarfik (University of Greenland) and Co-Director of the Arctic Vikings Archaeological Field School in Vatnahverfi region, South Greenland. Over the past two years he has been involved as a research partner in the REMAINS of Greenland project, exploring the effects of a shifting climate on the preservation of archaeological deposits in West Greenland and the consequent challenges to protecting and preserving Greenland’s cultural heritage. Hans’ research interests include human response to environmental uncertainty, coastal archaeology, industrial heritage, GIS and predictive modeling in archaeology and disability advocacy.

Dr. George Hambrecht is an Assistant Professor of Archaeology in the Anthropology Department at the University of Maryland College Park, USA. His research focuses on the zooarchaeology of the Norse North Atlantic with a focus on changing terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the dynamics between these and human settlement. He is currently developing a collaboration with Dr. Nicole Misarti of the University of Alaska Fairbanks to investigate the paleoecology of the North Atlantic through stable isotope and aDNA analysis of the remains of cod family species as well as a variety of other near shore species. The goal is to couple the existing archaeological record for Iceland more closely with marine paleoecological proxy data in order to examine the changing dynamics between people and marine ecosystems over the last millennium. Dr. Hambrecht has also collaborated with the US Park Service Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources, Dr. Marcy Rockman, in the creation of the US Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. He has been an active member of the NABO cooperative for the last 15 years. Dr. Hambrecht has worked on field sites in Iceland, Norway, the United States and the Caribbean.

Ben Fitzhugh is Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington. He studies human-environmental dynamics and the evolution of maritime hunter-gatherer lifeways in deep human pre/history by means of archaeological data sets. In case studies around the North Pacific, from Kodiak, Alaska to the Kuril Islands and Northern Japan, he has studied the colonization, persistence and extinction of human populations; risk exposure and technological invention; long-distance social networks; and the emergence of complex/non-egalitarian hunter-gatherers. This research engages draws inspiration from ethnohistory, historical ecology, environmental anthropology, behavioral ecology, and island biogeography. He collaborates widely with scholars across a range of disciplines from history, demography, climate, earth, ocean and biological sciences. He works closely with indigenous communities in Alaska and ran a field education program for high school students. From 2006-2012, he ran the Kuril Biocomplexity Project – an interdisciplinary survey and testing program designed to reconstruct human settlement histories and populations changes in the context of changing sociological, economic, geologic, climate and ecological histories.  In 2014, he co-founded a comparative marine ecological working group called Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS), which brings together archaeology, history, paleoclimate, and paleoecology to investigate similarities and differences in the historical ecologies of the subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic from the Last Glacial Maximum to recent centuries. Since 2014, he has served as Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington (on leave for 2018, then returning), and in this role, seeks to promote interdisciplinary studies of human-environmental dynamics since the ‘dawn of humanity’.

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.

Dr Stephen Dockrill is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford. Dr Dockrill is interested in the interface between economy and social hierarchies and in new techniques of site recording and visualization. Over the last 30 years, his research has centred around the investigation of “deep-time” or multi period sites in the Northern Isles of Britain (Tofts Ness, Orkney, the South Nesting Project, Shetland, Old Scatness, Shetland, Jarlshof, Shetland). These sites have long stratigraphic sequences over a millennium or more, allowing the impacts of cultural, climatic / environmental and economic change to be studied as core themes. This has resulted in the publication of a number of excavation volumes and research papers covering many aspects of these core themes. Current research (with Dr Julie Bond) centres on the excavation of an eroding coastal site at Swandro, on the Island of Rousay as part of the Gateway to the Atlantic Project and Rousay Field School, centred on the island of Rousay, Orkney (with Drs Julie Bond, Ingrid Mainland, Ruth Maher, Jane Downes). Here a Neolithic Chambered Cairn and a secondary settlement site spanning a millennium (from the Iron Age to Norse period) are providing the opportunity to assess the impact of coastal erosion and to inform on the core themes of marginality and adaptation to environmental and climate change. The research provides an important opportunity to develop student understanding of the fragility of the coastal archaeological heritage and the impact of climate change within a field school environment. Dr Dockrill is joint holder (with Julie Bond) of the University of Bradford’s Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award 2015 for the development of teaching methods in archaeological fieldwork.

Philip Buckland is an associate professor of environmental archaeology at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. With a PhD in environmental archaeology (2007), he is director of the Environmental Archaeology Lab infrastructure for research, consultancy and methods development. His research includes long-term changes in climate and environment, human impact on the landscape, and the interpretation of archaeological sites using fossil insect remains. He continues to maintain and develop the Bugs Coleaopteran Ecology Package, a research and teaching system for palaeoecology and ecology which has been active since the mid 1980s, and received an honourable mention at the 2015 international data rescue awards in the geosciences. Phil is also active in the Scandinavian archaeological consultancy sector and maintains cross-sector links with Swedish government administrations involved in cultural heritage impacts and management. Phil is director of the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database, a research data infrastructure for studying a broad range of aspects of past environments. The database includes data ranging from the individual counts of plant macrofossils from archaeological samples and geochemical measurements of soils, sediments and ceramics to modern ecological and climate reference data. He is also a member of the leadership council for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and Community, and a partner in the Swedish Lifewatch Consortium for biodiversity studies. Phil is involved in the development, application and study of these and other digital infrastructures, with a particular focus on linking ecology and biodiversity research to the humanities. Phil is a Co-PI of the NSF funded DataARC, a massively interdisciplinary project developing tools to link datasets from archaeology, paleoecology, climate science, history, and literature. He teaches a number of courses in archaeological theory and methods, including GIS and supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Robert Boschman is a professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is co-founder of the award-winning Under Western Skies biennial conference series on the environment held at Mount Royal from 2010 to 2016. A past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Dr. Boschman specializes in ecological approaches to teaching American literature, with emphasis on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. His monograph, In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Movement in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt, was published in 2009, and has been reviewed in journals internationally, including Anglia: A Journal of English Philology, ISLE, University of Toronto Quarterly, Choice, and The Goose. Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (co-edited with Mario Trono) was published in 2014 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; and On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities will be published by WLUP in 2018. Boschman’s book about growing up in northern Saskatchewan, The Ride Along: A Memoir of Place, Family, and Intergenerational Trauma, is forthcoming from the University of Regina Press. He also collaborates with Bill Bunn in documenting the abandoned mining town of Uranium City on the north of Lake Athabasca–their co-authored, open-access article, “Nuclear Avenue: ‘Cyclonic Development’, Abandonment, and Relations in Uranium City, Canada” was published in Humanities in January 2018. Boschman’s work in environmental still photography can be viewed at robertboschman.com.

Dr Julie Bond is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, University of Bradford. Dr Bond’s research has focused on the impact of climate and environment and the stability of agrarian strategies in marginal environments, mostly in the Northern Isles of Britain, using multiperiod settlements as a way of studying change over long time sequences. She is interested in the social and economic impact of Viking Landnám in the North Atlantic settlements, through excavations and research projects such as Pool, Orkney, Tofts Ness, Orkney (with Steve Dockrill), Old Scatness and Jarlshof, Shetland (with Steve Dockrill) and the Viking Unst Project, Shetland. She is currently co-directing (with Steve Dockrill) the excavation of an eroding coastal site at Swandro, on the Island of Rousay as part of the Gateway to the Atlantic Project; an international research-based Field School investigating the island of Rousay, Orkney, with Drs Stephen Dockrill, Ingrid Mainland, Ruth Maher, Jane Downes and Julie Gibson .Dr Bond lectures on the Viking settlement of the North Atlantic, Archaeozoology, Archaeobotany and advanced methods in Archaeology. Dr Bond is joint holder (with Steve Dockrill) of the University of Bradford’s Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award 2015 for the development of teaching methods in archaeological fieldwork and a student-nominated commendation in the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement 2017, for her work in the School of Archaeology and for teaching of Viking archaeology.

Kieran Baxter received his PhD in landscape heritage visualisation from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. His research is based in creative practice and explores the interaction between visualisation technologies, filmmaking, science communication and landscape issues. In 2016 he received the AHRC Research in Film doctoral award for his short film which combined aerial photography and computer modelling to tell the story of a prehistoric cultural landscape in his native Scotland. His interest is in how creative practice – facilitated by the latest in aerial and digital technologies – can communicate specialist knowledge of our environment to a general audience. This line of enquiry has led his visual practice from the cultural heritage of Scotland to the glacial landscapes of Iceland and the Alps. By better understanding how visualisation technologies operate in the context of visual culture and art practice, his research aims to improve the outreach tools available to scientists and environmental specialists.

Kieran’s heritage-focused work: www.topofly.com
Kieran’s climate-focused work: www.climatevis.com.

Dag Avango, PhD in History of Technology, is a researcher at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. In his research, he has primarily dealt with the relationship between resource extraction, science and (geo)politics in the polar regions from a long term historical perspective. A related field of research is on legacies of industry and how communities deal with such legacies when building post-industrial futures, through remediation and heritage processes.

Dag Avango’s research is situated at the interface between archaeology and history, based on the theoretical assumption that material objects and environments play an active role in society and therefore should be considered in explanations of historical change, and following this the methodological approach of combining archival studies with archaeological fieldwork. Dag Avango has published widely and also run graduate and post-graduate education on those topics.

Dag Avango is the XO of the Nordic Centre of Excellence REXSAC – Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities (www.rexsac.com). He also leads research projects under the umbrella of REXSAC, entitled Mining heritage as a resource for sustainable communities (https://www.kth.se/profile/avango/page/mining-heritage-as-a-resource-for-sustainable-communities) and is involved in a project exploring heritage processes in Antarctica. For more information on publications and research projects of Dag Avango, see https://dagavango.com/

Thorvardur Arnason has a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary environmental studies, focusing primarily on environmental philosophy and politics. His main research interests concern landscape and wilderness, nature conservation, climate change, sustainable tourism and sustainable rural development. Thorvardur has been the Director of the University of Iceland’s Hornafjörður Research Centre since 2006. He is also an assistant research professor in environmental studies at the University of Iceland and has supervised more than 20 graduate students. His previous work experience includes three years as Managing Director of the Icelandic National Bioethics Committee and seven years as researcher at the Centre for Ethical Studies, University of Iceland. Since 1998 Thorvardur has taught university level courses in e.g. management of protected areas, environmental ethics, sustainable tourism and philosophy of science. He has been the project leader of several large-scale research projects in Iceland and has also taken part in numerous multi-national research and/or development projects. Thorvardur Arnason has been a board member of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies since 2010.

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.

Dr. Andrew Dugmore is Professor of Geosciences in the Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. Andy is a physical geographer with extensive field experience in the North Atlantic islands. His research is focused on high resolution studies and long-term perspectives of change in complex social-ecological systems (particularly the Scandinavian settlements of the North Atlantic). Andy’s work seeks to better understanding the causes and consequences, physical records and human memory of environmental changes over timescales from decades to millennia. A key theme is the development and application of tephrochronology; a dating technique based on the identification and correlation of volcanic ash layers. Andy has developed tephrochronology in joint projects with geographers, Earth scientists and archaeologists, and applied it in glaciology, geomorphology, palaeoecology, archaeology and broader studies of geochronology with historians and literary scholars. In addition to chronology, current joint research projects on tephra are clarifying the processes and scale of post-depositional change to freshly fallen tephra layers, and how a better understanding of these changes can enhance the reconstruction of past volcanic eruptions, hazard assessment, and potentially provide new sources of data on the nature of the land surfaces on which the tephra was deposited. Andy is currently Professor of Geosciences at The University of Edinburgh and adjunct research faculty on the CUNY Doctoral Program in Anthropology in New York and at Washington State University.

Professor Jane Downes, PhD, MCIfA, is director of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) Archaeology Institute based in Orkney, Scotland. Jane has a background in commercial and research fieldwork, and has developed the archaeological degree programmes within the UHI. Jane has research interests in burial archaeology, particularly cremation, and in prehistoric and islands and coastal archaeology. She also has research interests in climate change and archaeology, the management and sustainable development of landscape and cultural heritage resources (and is involved in the research of several World Heritage Sites in connection with this), and community engagement including Education for Sustainability (including an initiative to connect islands communities in Orkney and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Jane’s research includes contributing to an understanding of prehistoric communities in the Northern Isles of Scotland through excavations at the Knowes of Trotty, Orkney Barrows and Swandro in Orkney (part of Orkney, Gateway to the Atlantic with S. Dockrill and J Bond) and currently is engaged in excavating early Neolithic settlement at Cata Sand, Orkney. Jane has also recently undertaken research in Rapa Nui into the impact of coastal erosion on the iconic monuments of the island. Jane is currently working with local communities in the Cook Islands to record and develop the distinctive archaeology present in these islands. Jane has also contributed to the ‘UNESCO World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate’ report and is a member inter alia of the Scottish Government Strategic Historic Environment Forum (SHEF) Climate Change Working Group. Further information on current projects are available at archaeologyorkney.com.