We are an international group of researchers and artists who share a common concern with revising Arctic history.
Photo showing participants in Arctic Voices’s first workshop at the Riddu Riđđu Festvála, Gáivuotna (Kåfjord), Norway, 2019.
Svein Aamold
Svein is professor of art history at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. In 2009-2017, he led the international Sámi Art Research Project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, and is the main editor of that project’s central output, the anthology Sámi Art and Aesthetics: Contemporary Perspectives (Aarhus 2017). Central areas of his research are Scandinavian and Spanish art since the nineteenth century, plus Sámi and indigenous art of the circumpolar regions. He has focused primarily on concepts of modernity, contemporaneity, nationalism, colonialism and indigenous revitalization. Currently, two Sámi artists are discussed in his work. On the one hand, the paintings of Synnøve Persen (b. 1950) and questions of modernism, abstraction, northern landscapes, artistic freedom and cultural activism. On the other hand, Johan Turi (1854–1936) as a pioneering author and artist presenting Sámi lives, customs, views of nature, etc., and recent discourses of assimilation, revitalization and ecology.
Linda Andersson Burnett
Linda is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her research focuses on the exchange of scientific and cultural thought between Britain and Scandinavia in the long eighteenth century, and the importance of colonial and nation-building encounters with marginalised and Indigenous social groups in the development of these exchanges. In her previous position, at the Linnaeus University, she convened an interdisciplinary research group on Nordic Colonialism. She is the author of a number of articles on Sámi history, ethnographic thought, scientific networks and travel writing. She has co-edited two recent special issues of History of the Human Sciences (2019) and Scandinavian Studies (2019).
Bruce Buchan
Bruce is a Professor of History at Griffith University, Brisbane. He is the author, co-author and editor of: An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (2014), and Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850 (2019), special issues of Cultural Studies Review (2018), Republics of Letters (2018), and History of the Human Sciences (2019), as well as papers published in Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, Intellectual History Review, and Cultural History. Bruce as held the Distinguished Visiting Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2015-16), a visiting professorship at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (2017), and in 2021 will take up a Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence. Bruce is an Advisory Board member of Arctic Voices.
Hanna Eglinger
Hanna studied Nordic philology, modern German literature, and education at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (Germany) and Uppsala University (Sweden). Since 2017 she has been teaching at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg as professor for Comparative and Scandinavian Literature. Previously she worked as Assistant professor for Nordic philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and was a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Her research areas include Arctic primitivism and Arctic literature, Scandinavian contemporary literature, Interart studies and body theories, poetics of parasitism, and constellations of beginning in Scandinavian literature. Book publications include: (with A. Heitmann) Landnahme. Anfangserzählungen in der skandinavischen Literatur um 1900 (2010); Der Körper als Palimpsest. Die poetologische Dimension des menschlichen Körpers in der skandinavischen Gegenwartsliteratur (2007), Nomadisch – Ekstatisch – Magisch: Skandinavischer Arktisprimitivismus im ausgehenden 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert (2021, forthcoming).
Lill Tove Fredriksen
Lill Tove is Associate Professor in Sámi Literature at UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta/ UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø. She has a special interest in oral traditions, contemporary Sámi prose, traditional knowledge, Indigenous methodologies, the Sámi language, Sámi history, and the development and the situation of the Sámi language in today’s society. Lill Tove Fredriksen has published widely in the Sámi language, and in Norwegian and English, on coping skills, old Sámi songs from the municipality of Porsanger, contemporary prose and traditional knowledge in Sámi literature. She participates in public debates concerning Sámi issues. She is a an editorial board member of the Sámi scientific journal Sámi dieđalaš áigečálá (2018-present), the current chair of the Portefolio board for Sámi research (the Board for Sámi research, part of the Norwegian Research Council, 2022-2026), and a member of the Norwegian UNESCO Commission (2021-2025).
Silje Gaupseth
Silje 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 expedition 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 museum exhibition Wanny and Henry: Hunting and Trapping in the Arctic (2019) and 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).
Sophie Gilmartin
Sophie 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 Arctic studies. She is currently writing a book on women and navigation in the Victorian period.
Charis Gullickson
Charis is a curator at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and a public sector PhD student at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. Her practice-based research project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, investigates curatorial strategies and methodologies for rethinking art in museums in the Circumpolar North. Craft and decolonization are her main areas of research interest. She has curated numerous exhibitions on Sámi art, along with several publications, such as Sámi Stories: Art and Identity of an Arctic People (2014). Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions Like Betzy (2019) and Intersections: Aslaug M. Juliussen (2018), with accompanying book (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart).
Sven Haakanson Jr.
Sven 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
Ingeborg is an Associate Professor of Art History at UiT the Arctic University of Norway. She is the project manager of Arctic Voices.
Axl Jeremiassen
Axl Jeremiassen is a scholar from Greenland. After ending his education at teachers training college Ilinniarfissuaq in 1988 he worked as a teacher in Qasigiannguit and Nuuk. After more than a decade as a schoolteacher he accomplished candidate education in Arctic Culture and Social History at Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland. In 2014-17, Axl took part in a research project about the American Rockwell Kent, which was financed by NSF. His current research concerns letters from the public to the editor of the Greenlandic periodicals Atuagagdliutit (1861) and Avangnâmiok (1913-1958) from the early 20th century until the beginning of WW2. As part of further special education programs he has been appointed to attend courses in Carleton University, Ottawa, and Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Renée Hulan
Renée is Professor of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the 2020-2021 Craig Dobbin Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author of Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic (Palgrave 2018), Canadian Historical Fiction: Reading the Remains (Palgrave 2014), Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (MQUP 2002), and the editor of Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (ECW 1999) and Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics co-edited with Renate Eigenbrod (Fernwood 2008). She co-edited the Journal of Canadian Studies with Donald Wright from 2005-2008.
Sigfrid Kjeldaas
Sigfrid is the Researcher on and co-author of Arctic Voices.
Lena Klein
Lena is a PhD student in the Arctic Voices Project at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. She studied American Studies, Spanish Literature, and Art History in Tübingen and Zaragoza. 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. These images are an outcome of his exploration travels in Alaska, British Columbia, and Siberia.
Charmaine A. Nelson
Charmaine is a Professor of Art History, a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement, and the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of 7 books, Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Canadian Studies, and African-Canadian Art History. She was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and a Fields of the Future Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, NYC (2021). Charmaine is an Advisory Board member on Arctic Voices.
Eavan O’Dochartaigh
Eavan is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-21) based at Humlab (Digital Humanities Centre) and Arcum (Arctic Research Centre) in Umeå University. Her current project (ARCVIS) gathers and maps nineteenth-century visual representations of indigenous people in the western Arctic. She is a recent graduate (2018) of the Department of English at National University of Ireland, Galway, where her PhD thesis examined the visual culture created by the exploration of the Northwest Passage in the 1850s, and is a graduate of the MPhil in Polar Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge (2005). Additionally, she has over ten years of experience as a consultant archaeologist, GIS specialist, and illustrator, working in Ireland, the UK, and Iceland.
Raisa Porsanger
Porsanger is a Northern Sámi artist from Porsanger and Karasjok, currently living and working in Oslo. As an artist she works with topics such as Sámi identity and culture, and formalistic examinations through photography, video, and installation art. Porsanger graduated with a BFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2015. She has shown her art works in exhibitions such as the exhibition Lives of Others – Stories by Francois- Auguste Biard et al. at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (NNKM, Northern Norway Art Museum), Tromsø, Norway in 2021, and previously at 40 jagi, a 40-year anniversary exhibition in Alta Museum, Norway, for the Sámi Artist Union, Hábmet hámi / Making form (shown at Sámi Dáiddaguovddáš, Karasjok, 2018; Terminal B, Kirkenes, 2019 and Tromsø kunstforening, 2019), Borgen Museum (2019), Tegnebiennalen (Galleri Format, 2016) and Oppstandelser (Kristiansand Kunsthall, 2016). Her works have been acquired by the Sámi Parliament in Norway in 2019 and NNKM in 2021. In 2020-2021 she worked part-time as a project officer and curatorial assistant in Office for Contemporary Art Norway, working with the Sámi Pavilion project which will be showcased in the Nordic Pavilion in the Venice Biennial 2022.
Henning Howlid 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.
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams
Maria was born in Tikahtnu – or Anchorage, Alaska and is Tlingit. She is of the Raven Moiety. 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. 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. 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. Research interests include contemporary Alaska Native music and dance practices; Alaska Native history, the impact of colonialism and cultural revitalization. She worked with the King Island IRA (an Alaskan Inupiaq community) on a heritage preservation project in conjunction with the National Park Service in 2000 and 2004, in which their entire music and dance repertoire were recorded.
Alison E. Wright
Alison is an art historian and sometime curator with a special interest in animals. She studied History and History of Art at University College London, before working for a decade as an Assistant in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, where she curated the touring exhibition Curious Beasts: Animal Prints from the British Museum (2013-17). She studied for her AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, ‘Animal and sporting painting in Britain, 1760-c.1850: its artistic practices, patronage and public display’, at the University of East Anglia and Tate Britain (2014-18), and was guest curator of the exhibition James Ward: Animal Painter at the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art, Newmarket (2018). She joined the Art Collections team at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2019-20.