Cameron C. Turley is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation research investigates ethnogenesis and politics in Colonial-Period South Greenland, using foodways as his material analytic. The research combines ethnographic and oral history interviews, archival material, and organic residue and zooarchaeological analysis to reconstruct and interpret changing culinary traditions. Cameron is Principal Investigator of the Alluitsoq Project, a community-based, collaborative archaeological research initiative at the former Lichtenau Moravian mission (established 1774). Since 2016, the project has grown to include numerous collaborations with junior and senior scholars in Greenland and beyond, continues to developed commitments to community engagement and knowledge co-production, is building capacity to respond to cultural heritage threatened by climate change, and is becoming a productive intervention in conversations of Arctic histories and futures in an ecologically and politically precarious time. 

In 2020, The Alluitsoq Project was selected as a top-ranked project for formal affiliation with UNESCO’s new “Building Resilience in Defense of Global Environments and Societies” initiative for integration into their MOST (Management of Social Transformations) intergovernmental science program. The intention of the coalition is to better integrate humanities, social science, and local and traditional knowledge perspectives into research, education and action for global sustainability through development and coordination of resilient responses to environmental and social changes at local and territorial scales.

Eric Paglia is a researcher at the Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership at the Swedish Defense University, with an affiliation at REXSAC – Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities​. His research interests include environmental crisis and the history of global environmental governance; the relationship of science and geopolitics on Svalbard and the wider Arctic; and the concept of the Anthropocene in relation to environmental history and human-nature interactions. Eric Paglia’s dissertation The Northward Course of the Anthropocene: Transformation, Temporality and Telecoupling in a Time of Environmental Crisis (KTH Royal Institute of Technology 2016), as well as his ongoing postdoctoral research, encompasses these and other related topics.  ​

Parker Krieg is a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki, affiliated with the Humanities Programme in the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS). He received his PhD in English from the University of Oregon with a focus on American literature and the cultural economies of post-Fordism. His recent article, “Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofictions,” appears in Studies in American Fiction. It examines the conjunctural relation between energy crisis and finance in 1979, and the rise of short-term speculation in response to a receding horizon of national and post-national futures. Krieg began exploring ecocritical approaches to cultural memory after joining the “Inscribing Environmental Memory” field seminar organized by the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES). His current research examines the relation between narrative and material archive across three dimensions: 1) the retention of “difficult” social-environmental pasts, 2) transnational geographies shaped by various modes of anticipation, and 3) the posthuman technics of memory. In Helsinki, he coordinates the environmental humanities reading group within the arts faculty, which is part of the EH Forum of the newly established Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science.

Parker Krieg
Postdoctoral Researcher
Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki
Unioninkatu 40 B 621
https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/person/cpkrieg
parker.krieg@helsinki.fi
+358 503119441

Michael W. Twomey is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts (emeritus) at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA, where he taught medieval literature, environmental criticism, and the history and structure of English. In 2014 and 2015, he taught on the faculty of the Svartárkot Culture-Nature program in Northern Iceland; in 1996-97, he was a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Dresden, Germany; and he has given invited lectures in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Canada, and the USA. In his ecocritical research, Michael reads medieval literature as a source of environmental history on the one hand and as a source of environmental memory and ideology on the other. Examples are “How Green Was the Green Knight?” (Arthurian Literature, 2013) and “‘The Fjords Were Full of Fish’: Environmental Conventions in Landnám Narratives” (12th Annual Fiske Conference on Icelandic Studies, Cornell University, 2017). Currently, Michael’s major ecocritical project is a book, Encyclopedic Environments, about the representation of nature in the medieval encyclopedias of England used for studying the liberal arts. Encyclopedias focused on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern environments as keys to reading classical and biblical texts, ignoring the local countryside.  Exemplary Environments thus explores how medieval encyclopedias helped create culturally meaningful but non-scientific paradigms of nature that have influenced modern environmental beliefs. Michael has presented papers drawn from the book in the USA and Europe. He is also one of the editors of the first modern edition of the Middle Ages’ most successful encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (On the properties of things) by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (ca. 1240).

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.

Ian A. Simpson is Professor of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. His research specialism is in Geoarchaeology, defined as the reading of soil and sediment stratigraphies found in archaeological and historical landscapes with the purpose of creating new narratives of relationships between societies and their environments. These stratigraphies reflect site activities and early land uses together with associated environmental contexts; they are records of the complex relationships between past societies and bio-physical processes, of landscape histories. Narratives are ‘read’ through innovative theoretical frameworks of landscape and by new techniques in soils and sediments analyses including thin section micromorphology – SEM – EDX, XRF, soil biomarkers and soils and landscape modelling. These analyses offer contributions to transdisciplinary discussion on a) Long-term sustainabilities and resiliences, b) Place, heritage and identity and are applied into c) programmes of Citizen Geosciences. Current major and long-term research programmes are focussed on creating geoarchaeology and landscape change narratives of The North Atlantic region, South Asia and the Middle East. Major themes are: Pristine space to cultural place, Hybrid landscapes; Completed experiments in northern community resilience’s; Soils and Neolithic ritual landscapes; Industrial landscape legacies. He has published over 150 research papers on geoarchaeology themes and has supervised 26 PhD students to successful completion.

Marcy Rockman is the US National Park Service (NPS) Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources, based in Washington, DC. An archaeologist by training, her research focus is how humans gather, share, remember, and transmit environmental information, particularly during colonization. She’s done fieldwork across the American West and Europe and in the Middle East and has worked in environmental compliance in many western states as well. Marcy began work in the DC policy world as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow in which capacity she connected archaeology to homeland security risk communication at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Her current role at the NPS addresses impacts of climate change on cultural heritage and use of cultural heritage information in federal- to global-level climate adaptation and mitigation planning. Her major publications include the volumes Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation and Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World, and the new NPS Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. Marcy has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, and B.Sc. in Geology from the College of William and Mary.

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.

Dr. Lea Rekow is co-lead and co-curator of BifrostOnline, an international, open-access project promoting education for sustainability and climate change awareness.  Lea has held positions as executive director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe (NM), founding director of Gigantic ArtSpace (NY), media director at the former Center for Peace and Human Security (NY), adjunct professor of media and communications at Pratt Institute (NY), and cultural advisor for Advance (Australian consulate in NY). She is an advisor to the Integrated Media and Art and Technology programs at Cal Arts, and a member of the Institute for Australian Geographers and of New York Women in Film and Television. She was formerly special envoy for the European-based Open & Agile Smart Cities, an advisor to the European Urban IxD program, and a research fellow at the Center for Art and the Environment (NV). She has sat on numerous advisory panels including for NYFA, SVA, Parsons, Amnesty International, the MacArthur award, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Lea’s PhD research focused on creative, transdisciplinary practices for reclaiming degraded space in areas where people are living under extreme socio-economic and environmental stress. She has worked extensively with ethnic minorities and marginalized communities, including in conflict zones in Burma, on large-scale land use reclamation projects on the Navajo Nation. Lea founded Green My Favela, an urban restoration project based in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in 2011, and has helped establish some of the largest-scale urban organic gardening projects in Latin America.

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.