Biographies
Lisa Monica Aslaksen is Assistant Professor in Sami Literature at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she has been since 2021. From 2007-2021 she has been Head of section and senior advisor at the language department at the Sami Parliament. Her research interests are Sami literature, Sami cultural history and Sami literature didactics.
Fredrik Chr. Brøgger is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and Civilization UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Most of his former work has concerned itself with American Studies. His research before 2000 centered mainly on American Culture Studies and American literature, not least on the literary modernism of the 1920s. In subsequent years, however, nature writing, ecocriticism and Arctic Studies increasingly served as his main fields of interest, spawning articles on works by for instance Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, American Romantic writers, Annie Dillard, Knut Hamsun, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Barry Lopez, Knud Rasmussen, and Helge Ingstad. Since his retirement, Brøgger has been working on a book-length narrative of the life of plants, animals and people in a particular area of the subarctic heath in northernmost Norway called Finnmarksvidda.
Laura Castor is professor in American Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where since 1997 she has taught literature, culture, and Indigenous studies. She has published articles on contemporary Native North American and African American fiction, life narrative, and poetry, and gendered discourses in fiction of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by writers such as Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, Heid Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Toni Morrison, Nicole Krauss, Melanie Thernstrom, Siri Hustvedt, Rita Mestokosho, Sherman Alexie, and Sara Orne Jewett. In research and teaching, she seeks to understand the ways in which specific historical and intersectional contexts are represented in the arts, and the potential of the arts to influence readers’ social realities outside the text. She is especially interested in questions related to collective memory, decolonial and antiracist interventions in the academy, and the process of working through trauma as expressed in multiple forms, including life writing, fiction, and crossovers between fiction, visual art, and music. Her book, Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse: Stories of Survival and Possibility (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) addresses these issues.
Lill Tove Fredriksen received her PhD from UiT the Arctic University of Norway, focusing in the thesis on the coping skills in the novel trilogy Árbbolaččat (“The heirs”) written by the Sámi novelist Jovnna-Ánde Vest. She is Associate Professor in Sámi Literature at the same university. She has published widely in the Sámi language, and in Norwegian and English, on coping skills and traditional knowledge in Sámi literature. She also participates in the public debate concerning Sámi issues.
Harald Gaski is a Professor in Sámi Literature at Sámi allaskuvla / Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Guovdageaidnu and Professor in Sámi Culture and Literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Gaski was born and lives in Deatnu (Tana) in Sápmi. He is the author and editor of several books on Sámi literature and culture. He has also translated Sámi literature and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s poetry into Norwegian and English. Gaski has been a visiting scholar at several universities internationally and is much in demand as a speaker at conferences both domestically and internationally. He served on the International Research Advisory Panel of New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence for 10 years (2006-2015). Gaski’s research specializes in Indigenous methodologies and Sámi traditions, culture and literature. He has been instrumental in establishing Sámi literature as an academic field. Gaski’s research has been recognized, among others with the Israel Ruong award in 1987, the Nordic Sámi Language Prize Gollegiella in 2006, and the Vardduo /Cesam's research award at the University of Umeå in Sweden in 2015. Gaski’s most recent book is an anthology of Sámi literature, published in 2020, titled Myths, Tales and Poetry from Four Centuries of Sámi Literature. His first book is from 1987, Med ord skal tyvene fordrives, an account and analysis of narrative juoigan (Sámi folk music) texts, which is another field of Gaski’s many research interests.
Silje Gaupseth is Associate Professor of Cultural Sciences and Director of the Polar Museum at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a PhD in English literature and has published on narrative self-representation in Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s exploration account The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (1921). Together with Per Pippin Aspaas and Marie-Theres Federhofer, she has edited the collection Travels in the North: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Long History of Northern Travel Writing (2013). Recent work include the co-curated museum exhibitions Queering The Polar Museum (2022) and Wanny and Henry: Hunting and Trapping in the Arctic (2019), as well as the book chapter “An Arctic Tom Sawyer? Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Violet Irwin’s Kak” in The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Hansson et al. 2020). Gaupseth is currently a member of the research group XARC (UiT), and the projects Arctic Voices (UiT), Arctic Auditories (UiT) and QUEERDOM (UiB).
Sophie Gilmartin has degrees from Yale University and the University of Cambridge, and is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (CUP), co-author with Rod Mengham of Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction: A Critical Study (EUP) and has edited Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset for Penguin Classics. Her main research interests and publications lie in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, visual arts, maritime studies and the C19th Arctic. She is currently writing a book for Reaktion Press on women and navigation in the Victorian period, The Winter Widows: Two Women Navigating Cape Horn, 1856.
Charis Gullickson is a curator at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Northern Norway Art Museum) and PhD candidate at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway in Romsa. Her doctoral project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, aims to disrupt the status quo in art museum practices within a theoretical framework of museums as agents of change. Her dissertation “Talking Back to Art Museum Practices: Seeing Public Art Museums in Norway Through the Lens of Institutional Critique” is inspired by the phrase “Museums Are Not Neutral.” She has curated numerous exhibitions on Sámi dáidda (art) and craft, as well as authored several accompanying publications. She is a settle born and raised in Alaska and an immigrant in Sápmi / Northern Norway since 2004. She is also a mother of two children and a former competitive cross-country skier.
Sven Haakanson Jr., Ph.D., is Sugpiaq from Old Harbor, Alaska. He is a Curator of North American Anthropology at the Burke Museum, and a Professor and the current Chair in Anthropology at the University of Washington. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2007), the Museums Alaska Award for Excellence (2008), the ATALM Guardians of Culture and Lifeways Leadership Award (2012), and his work on the Angyaaq led it to being inducted into the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame (2020). He joined the University of Washington in 2013. He engages communities in cultural revitalization using material reconstruction as a form of scholarship and teaching. His projects have included the reconstruction of full-sized angyaaq (open boat) from archaeological models, as well as halibut hooks, masks, paddles, and traditional processing of bear gut into waterproof material for clothing. He has and continues to collaborate with the community of Akhiok at their Akhiok Kids camp since 2000.
Ingeborg Høvik is associate professor in Art History at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and manager of the Arctic Voices project. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Between 2014 and 2017 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research, UiT. She has been a Caird Short-term Research Fellow at the National Maritime Museum, London (2008), a guest researcher at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Sweden (2015), and a visiting researcher at Greenland National Museum and Archives (2015, 2019). Her research focuses on representations of the Arctic in European and Inuit art and visual culture, and one of her recent publications, co-authored with and translated by Axel Jeremiassen, is “Qalaherriap ilisaritinnera (1856-mi toqusoq). Tuluit nunaanni inuiaqatigiinni 'Erasmus York'-itut akulerunniarnera» (Portrait of Qalaherria (d. 1856), his life in Britain as 'Erasmus York') in Kalaaleq, 2 and 3, 2022.
Renée Hulan is the author of Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic (Palgrave 2018), Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains (Palgrave, 2014) and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (McGill-Queens, 2002). She served as President of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d’études canadiennes (2018-2020) and was co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes with Donald Wright (2005-2008). She also edited Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (ECW, 1999) and, with Renate Eigenbrod, Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics (Fernwood, 2008). In 2020-2021, she was the Craig Dobbin Professor at the University College Dublin.
Axel Jeremiassen is a Kalaallit Inuit historian and employee for the Secretariat of the Constitutional Commission in Nuuk. After ending his education at the teachers’ training college Ilinniarfissuaq in 1988 he worked as a teacher in Qasigiannguit and Nuuk. After more than a decade as a schoolteacher he completed an MA-degree in Arctic Culture and Social History at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). As part of his further education, he attended PhD-courses at Carleton University in Ottawa, and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 2014-17, Jeremiassen took part in a research project funded by the National Science Foundation, on the American explorer Rockwell Kent. His current research concerns the political history of Kalaallit Nunaat through analyses of letters from the public to the editor of the Kalaallit periodicals Atuagagdliutit (1861) and Avangnâmiok (1913-1958) from the early twentieth century until the beginning of the Second World War. Jeremiassen is part of the Arctic Voices Project.
Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History and Co-director of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger, Norway. She is an environmental historian unconstrained by typical periodization boundaries, with publications spanning from medieval urban sanitation to the modern use of offshore oil structures as artificial reefs. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animal extinction and recovery, particularly the implications of extinction for cultural heritage and museum practices. Her book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging was published by The MIT Press in 2019. She has co-edited four volumes: New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (2013); Northscapes: History, Technology & the Making of Northern Environments (2013); Visions of North in Premodern Europe (2018); and Silver Linings: Clouds in Art & Science (2020). She is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities. She previously served two terms as President of the European Society for Environmental History (2013-2017).
Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund is a postdoctoral research associate at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she holds a Carlsberg Fellowship for the project “Economizing Science and National Identities: The Royal Greenland Trading Department and the Making of Modern Denmark and Greenland”. She previously worked at the University of Cambridge and the University of Leeds, and is the author of the book Explorations in the Icy North, which was published with the University of Pittsburg Press in 2021. Her research examines the intersection of Arctic exploration, race, print culture, science, religion, and medicine in the modern period with a focus on the British, North-American, and Danish imperial worlds.
Sigfrid Kjeldaas is a researcher at the UiT Arctic Voices project. Her educational background is in ecology and literature, and in 2017 she received her PhD in literature and culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway with the dissertation Nature Writing as Contact Zone. Kjeldaas’ publications focus on the relationality and aesthetics of nature writing and exploration literature about the Arctic. As a postdoc at GenØk – Centre for biosafety, she did interdisciplinary work on the discourses of genome editing in the project «ReWrite: New knowledge to navigate the rewriting of human/nature relations through genome editing in the search for sustainable food». Kjeldaas has also been active in the work for gender equality at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she headed the 2016-2018 “Career Development Program for Women” and acted as coordinator for the RCN project “Prestige: Gender Balance in Research Leadership at UiT The Arctic University of Norway” from 2018 to 2019.
Lena Klein is a Doctoral Research Fellow in the Arctic Voices Project at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. She studied American Studies, Spanish Literature and Art History in Tübingen, Germany, and Zaragoza, Spain. Funded by the Research Council of Norway, her PhD project examines the visual and textual account of Indigenous people living in the Arctic in Frederick Whymper’s (1838-1901) works. His sketches and watercolours are an outcome of his exploration travels in Alaska, British Columbia, and Siberia. In addition to the images, his book Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, formerly Russian America–now ceded to the United States–and in various other parts of the North Pacific (1868) is one of the main sources.
Sakura Koretsune was born in 1986 in Kurahashi Island of Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. She graduated from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2010 (B.F.A.: Painting), where she studied Native Arts of Alaska, Painting, and Sculpture. She earned her Master’s degree in Localized Design from Tohoku University of Art and Design in 2017. She joins the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo as a guest researcher for one year (2022-2023) with the support of the "Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists" of The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. She will participate in the ERC-funded research project "Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia”. Her artistic publication project "Ordinary Whales" is a series of small booklets containing both visual works and texts, on which she has worked since 2016.
Sigrid Lien (b. 1958) is professor in art history and photography studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Project leader for the Norwegian team in the HERA-project “PhotoClec” (Museums, Colonial past and Photography) 2010-2012, and for the project “Negotiating History: Photography in Sámi Culture», funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2014-2017). Lien has published extensively on nineteenth century as well as modern and contemporary photography.
Katarina Wadstein MacLeod is professor of History of Art, Södertörn University. She has published on the female figure and women artists, domesticity in visual arts, and centre-and periphery in exhibitions studies in articles and books such Lena Cronqvist: Reflections of Girls (2006) Bakom Gardinerna: Hemmet i konsten under nittonhundratalet, Atlas 2018 and Från flux till fest. Eje Högestätt och den franska konsten på Lunds konsthall 1965-1967( (forthcoming 2021). She is currently writing about the ideological underpinnings in 19th century scientific illustrations of Nordic nature in the three-year research project Illustrating Neutral Nature: Scientific Depictions of the Arctic from St Petersburg, Stockholm, and Paris.
Jérémie McGowan is a designer, changemaker and punk rock bassist based in Romsa, Sápmi. He has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and teaches, exhibits, curates, writes and performs internationally. Together with Anne May Olli and RiddoDuottarMuseat in Kárášjohka he is co-creator of the internationally acclaimed museum performance, Sámi Dáiddamuseax (2017– ). In 2021 Jérémie launched Arctic Armpit, a one-man-punk-band, experimental thinktank and (activist) design agency. He is currently teaching design theory at AHO / The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Eavan O’Dochartaigh is an Honorary Research Lecturer at University of Galway, Ireland. She graduated in 2018 with a PhD in English, funded by the Irish Research Council and a Hardiman Scholarship, under the supervision of Prof Daniel Carey and Dr Nessa Cronin. From 2019 to 2021, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at Umeå University, Sweden, under the supervision of Prof Maria Lindgren Leavenworth. Her current project at University of Galway is with the mentorship of Prof Daniel Carey and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council’s Pathway Programme (2022-26). Her first monograph Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages, based on her PhD thesis, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 and is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Jelena Porsanger is a Sámi scholar with Doctoral degree in the history of religion and Indigenous research from UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and a degree of Licentiate in Philosophy from the University of Helsinki (Finland). Currently she is Museum manager of The Sámi Museum in Karasjok / Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat under the museum association RiddoDuottarMuseat (Norway), and Associated researcher at the Indigenous Studies Program, the University of Helsinki. Jelena is an editorial Board Member of Dutkansarvvi dieđalaš áigečála, a research journal of The Sámi Language and Culture Research Association Dutkansearvi, with peer-review. She was Vice-Chancellor of Sámi University of Applied Sciences (Norway) in 2011-2015. One of the most important achievements of Sámi University during this period is the development of a PhD Program in Sámi Language and Literature, which started in 2016. Jelena worked previously as Director of the Nordic Sami Institute, as senior researcher, and as lecturer at various universities in the Nordic countries. In the period 2007-2011 she was the Chief Editor of a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary research journal, Sámi dieđalaš áigečála, which accepts research articles originally written in the Sámi languages. In 2015-2020 she was the Editorial Board Member of AlterNative, An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples, SAGE Journals (Aotearoa/New Zealand). In 2010-2011 she led a research project on the development of methodology, documentation, preservation, protection and storage of Árbediehtu - traditional Sámi knowledge. Porsanger was in 2010 also a member of the panel of experts for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. As a museum Director, she was recently involved in the well-publicized repatriation of a Sámi drum from Denmark to RDM - The Sámi Museum in Karasjok, the first Sámi drum to be repatriated from abroad.
Roswitha Skare is a Professor of Documentation Studies at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests include documentation theory, the impact of paratexts on literature and film, the performance practices of silent films, as well as the LAM-field and social media. She holds a doctoral degree in Documentation Science from the University of Tromsø.
Kirsten Thisted is an associate professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen and adjunct professor at Ilisimatusarfik, The University of Greenland. She has published extensively on Kalaallit (Greenlandic) oral traditions and modern literature. Relevant to this presentation is in particular: Taama allattunga, Aron. Aalup Kangermiup oqaluttuai assiliaalu tamakkiisut; Således skriver jeg, Aron. Samlede fortællinger og illustrationer af Aron fra Kangeq (Atuakkiorfik 1999). See also Thisted, K.: Greenlandic Oral Traditions: Collection, Reframing and Reinvention. In K. Thisted, & K. Langgård (eds.), From Oral Tradition to Rap: Literatures of the Polar North (63-118). Forlaget Atuagkat/Ilisimatusarfik, 2011.
Maria Shaa Tlaa Williams was born in Tikahtnu – or Anchorage, Alaska and is Tlingit. She received her M.A. and PhD in Music, specializing in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. The title of her M.A. Thesis is: Clan Identification and Social Structure in Tlingit Music (1989) and the title of her dissertation is Alaska Native Music: The Spirit of Survival (1996). She was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 1998 and researched surviving ceremonial music/dance in Alaska, and reviewed historic 18th, 19th and 20th century documents. She taught at the Institute for American Indian arts from 1993-1995, and at the University of New Mexico from 1999-2011 with a joint appointment in the department of Native American Studies and Music. She has been teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage since 2011 in the departments of Alaska Native Studies and Music, where she is a full professor. Her publications include The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture & Politics (2009); a documentary film on Athabascan Basket maker Daisy Stridzatze Demientieff (A Beautiful Journey 2009), and various articles on Alaska Native cultural revitalization.
Henning H. Wærp Henning is Professor of Nordic Literature at UiT. He is co-editor of Arctic Discourses (2010) and was a member of the steering committee for the research project Arctic Modernities, with multiple journal and book (2017) publications on Arctic literature.
Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp (1963-), Professor of Scandinavian Literature, UiT–The Arctic University of Norway, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Department of Language and Culture. Editor of the academic journal Edda, 2005–2010. Member of editorial board, Ibsen Studies, from 2003–. President of The International Ibsen Committee from 2018–. Leader of the research group The Ibsen/Hamsun Network, member of the research group Arctic Humanities, both at UiT –The Arctic University of Norway. Research fields: Scandinavian literature from 19th century–today, especially Ibsen, Hamsun, Vesaas, Fosse; Arctic literature, ethics and literature, adaptation of literature to film. Currently working with a project on film adaptations of Ibsen's and Hamsun’s works + a project on the representation of the Sami in Hamsun’s authorship.