The conference begins with an artistic session at Kulturhuset September 3rd. On September 4th and 5th, 36 participants will share their paper on the intersection between water, environmentalism, literature and emotions. The lectures are open for everyone, but we ask that you register your interest on this form before August 20th.
See also the shortened version of the program (PDF).
Contact persons: organising committee
- Project leader Stefka G. Eriksen, mail: s.g.eriksen@iln.uio.no
- Project member Rebecca Marcella Suter, mail: r.m.suter@ikos.uio.no
- Project member Kristen May Mills, mail: k.m.mills@iln.uio.no
- Research assistant Kaja Ladstein, mail: k.e.r.ladstein@iln.uio.no
Conference program
September 3rd Kulturhuset Oslo, Boksen
16.30-17.00 Registration
17.00-20.00 Conference Opening and Artistic Session
17.00 Welcome by Stefka G. Eriksen and Mathilde Skoie, Vice-Rector for research and internationalization at the University of Oslo
Artistic Keynote
17:10-18:00: Andri Snær Magnason: “Looking for words in a paradigm shift”
We are faced with a challenge that is larger than language. We are in a situation called "climate change" in the media but it is actually an imbalance or realignment of all elements of water on our planet. The glaciers, the sea level, the seasons, the permafrost, the pH of the world oceans, the currents, the rain and snow, the absence of water in droughts. We are the first generation of humans that understand that we can melt glaciers and we have among us today - the first generation of politicians that discuss issues like human caused sea level rise. We are in the anthropocene, we are in a paradigm shift, where a system is collapsing and with it a way of speaking and explaining our existence. A collapse of language, where events are on a scale that can only be compared to mythological metaphors.
Andri Snær Magnason will explore what it means to be a writer during a paradigm shift. We have witnessed such shifts throughout history, paradigm shifts in religion, science, politics and in our social fabric. The issue we are faced with today is larger than language. Andri uses the black hole as a metaphor. The only way to understand a black hole is by looking at the periphery, at the neighboring stars and galaxies. Andri Snær is a poet and storyteller, he will weave a story through family stories, myth and science to navigate and understand the scale of this black hole.
Andri Snær Magnason is an Icelandic writer and documentary film maker born in Reykjavík in 1973. His work ranges from poetry to non-fiction, children's literature, science fiction, theater and documentary film. He has won the Icelandic literary Award in all categories. His work is published and performed in more than 40 languages and his one man show in the City Theater in Iceland had dozens of sold out performances.
Andri hit the world news in 2019 when he wrote the text for Ok glacier, the first glacier Iceland lost to climate change. In his book "On Time and Water", he searches for a language to explain the climate crisis, through science, family stories and mythology. The book is being made into a documentary film for Nat Geo, by Oscar nominated Sara Dosa (Fire of Love) and Oscar winner Shane Boris (Navalny). His own Documentary film Dreamland premiered at IDFA 2009 and The Hero's Journey to the Third Pole premiered at COP:DOX in 2021. Andri has won international literary awards like the Tiziano Terzani Award in Italy, the Philip K. Dick honorary mention in USA for LoveStar and the Grand Prix l'Imaginaire in France from best foreign Sci-fi. Andri ran for president of Iceland in 2016 and came third.
Andri has collaborated with artists like Yo Yo Ma and Ryuichi Sakamoto, with Bjarke Ingels and BIG group in Architecture and with Arnhildur Pálmadóttir for the Lavaforming project in the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025. Andri is a popular public speaker and has opened international conferences, like the SMI in Hampton Court Palace in 2025 or the PMAC medical conference in Bangkok in 2023.
Artists presenting:
Miriam Sentler & Sadie Elizabeth Hale, science and art
Miriam Sentler is a contemporary artist and humanities researcher originally from Limburg, the border region between Germany and the Netherlands, now living and working in Norway. Educated at the Maastricht Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Amsterdam, she is currently a doctoral research fellow in Petroculture Studies at the University of Oslo, where she studies "energy acts:" being satirical performances happening in relation to oil- and wind-industries in the Shetland Islands. Her interdisciplinary work deals with mining histories on land and in the sea, formulating creative ways of archiving and communicating the realities of the extractive landscapes.
Website: www.miriamsentler.com
Sadie Hale is a social anthropologist, writer and educator interested in human relations with oceanic animals. Her PhD research, ‘Looking at People Looking at Whales’, draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Arctic Norway and explores different conceptions of whales across the domains of tourism, whaling, and scientific research. Sadie also convenes and teaches the course 'Ocean Anthropology' to master and bachelor students at the University of Bergen. Her earlier research focused on the history of Greenland shark hunting in the North Atlantic, as well as basking shark hunting in the Hebrides. This led to the artistic collaboration with Miriam Sentler, 'Cairban: A Contemporary Shark Hunt', which has been performed in Amsterdam and Bergen.
Website: https://sadiehale.eu/
Karen Aare, visual art
Karen Aarre (b. London, 1972) is a visual artist based in Oslo. She has studied at the University of Lisbon, and De Vrije Academy of arts, The Hague. She also holds a DPhil (2000) in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and has previously worked as a documentary filmmaker.
Aarre’s work explores the intersection between the natural and the constructed, the wild and the tamed, permanence and impermanence. Her practice often draws on parks and gardens—cultivated landscapes that reflect histories of colonialism, power, status, and scientific progress, while also embodying creativity, wonder, and imagination. In addition to her botanical art, Aarre is an accomplished portrait painter, and illustrated a book on hedgehogs for Ena Forlag in 2020. Recent exhibitions include St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2024), Høstutstillingen, Norway (2024), Khaak Kunsthall, Norway (2023), Edvard Munch’s Studio, Norway (2022, 2014), Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark (2021, 2019), and Ljungberg Museum, Sweden (2021, 2019). Her work is held in public and private collections, including St Antony’s College Art Collection, The Natural History Museum of Norway, Queen Sonja’s KunstStall, and Fundação D. Luis I, Portugal.
Elizabeth Gallon Droste, writing and sound
Elizabeth Gallón Droste (b. Bogotá) is an artist, anthropologist, and educator. Her practice begins with a long-standing question: who or what is a river—where does it begin, where does it end? Through the arts of listening and situated research, she has been learning with fluvial ecologies, territorial memory, and the re-mediation of landscapes marked by extraction. She develops collaborative and sensorial processes to attune to the ecofonic stories woven and narrated by territo-rivers. Her work cultivates modes of relation attentive to the (im)material, planetary, and cosmological tensions that shape territories.
Her doctoral research (Voicing Rivers Atrato, Freie Universität Berlin) focused on embodied and relational listening practices alongside the Atrato River and its communities.
She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Spatial Cosmology at HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Since 2022, she has been part of the artistic duo ~pes, attuning to subterranean and interstitial worlds through sonic evocations. Her work has been presented at documenta15, Meandering (TBA21 Academy), and RAW Material Dakar, and she is the author of the book Útica, Under the Murmuring Waters (Oreri, 2024).
Kristina Gjems, dance
Kristina Gjems is trained at London Contemporary Dance School and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1984. Her works include stage and site-specific productions as well as dance films. She has been practicing and teaching Taiji for many years, which influences her movement vocabulary and inspires her artistic approach.
Her practice often takes place in nature and the experience of connection between the body, movement, the elements and surroundings is strongly present in her work.
September 4th Professorboligen
8.30-9.00: Coffee and Registration
Keynote 1
9:00-10:00: Marilina Cesario: “Fiery Skies and Bloody Waters in Early Medieval Literature”
Chair: Stefka G. Eriksen
References to bloody rain, pools of blood emerging from the ground and skies ablaze with fire appear across a wide range of early medieval literary genres, including historiography (chronicles, annals, and world histories), epistolary exchanges, Biblical commentaries and poetry from continental, Eastern and Old English sources. Central to these accounts is the potent, symbolic interplay between the elements of Water and Fire, two opposing yet deeply interconnected forces in the medieval cosmological imagination.
The connection between water and blood is ancient and persistent. Such phenomena, first theorised in Aristotle’sMeteorologica and further elaborated in Arabic scientific texts, are later reinterpreted in the works of Seneca, Pliny and Isidore. These elemental convergences, rain turning to blood, or water bubbling with crimson effusion, merge the life-sustaining properties of water with the destructive, purgative associations of blood and fire.
A striking Anglo-Saxon example appears in Alcuin’s 793 letter to the monks of Lindisfarne following the Viking invasion, where he reports a pluvia sanguinis a ‘rain of blood’, likely an aurora borealis. This fiery sky, manifesting through a medium of water, is interpreted as divine punishment. Similarly, the Peterborough Chronicle for 1098 records that ‘in Berkshire, at Finchampstead, a pool bubbled up with blood […] Before Michaelmas the sky looked as if it were burning nearly all night’. Here again, liquid earth and inflamed sky conjoin to signal spiritual warning and celestial unrest.
Descriptions such as blod weallan of eorþan (‘blood welling from the earth’), bloody snow, and bloody hail blur the lines between the solid, liquid and gaseous states of water, now tinged with fire and blood. These phenomena, still largely overlooked in medieval scholarship, function as more than natural marvels: they are elemental signs, fusions of Water and Fire that reflect cosmic imbalance and divine displeasure.
This talk re-examines these occurrences not only as meteorological curiosities but as symbolic manifestations saturated with religious and prophetic meaning. It draws upon the works of Greek natural philosophers and considers how their ideas were transmitted and reimagined in early medieval England. By tracing the fluid interweaving of fire and water, flaming heavens and bleeding earth, this study reveals how natural elements were co-opted to communicate moral, theological and eschatological truths.
Marilina Cesario is Professor of Early Medieval Literature at Queen's University Belfast. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester. Prior to her current position at Queen's, she was Lecturer in Medieval English and History of the English Language at Brasenose College, University of Oxford.
She has published extensively in the fields of medieval prognostication, meteorology, and transmission of astronomical knowledge. Her current monograph focuses on 'The Elements and the Environment in the Early Middle Ages'. On this topic, she has co-edited two volumes on the Elements in the medieval period: The Elements in the Medieval World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. WATER, vol. 1 (Brill, 2024) and The Elements in the Medieval World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. EARTH, vol. 2 (Brill, 2024). The last two volumes on Air and Fire have just been submitted and will appear at the beginning of 2026. She is the chief editor of the Book Series 'Elements, Nature, Environment Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the Ancient to the Early Modern World' (Brill).
Room 1: Stallen
10:15-11:45 Session 1: Northern Currents: Water in Old English and Early Medieval Vernacular Texts
Chair: Kristen May Mills
Minjie Su, University of Oslo: “‘Along the Ice-cold Sea’: A Psycho-geographical Approach to the Sea. Imagery in the Old English Elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer”
Introduced by Guy Debord in 1955, the concept of ‘psycho-geography’ explores ‘the exact laws and…the specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously arranged or not, acting directly upon the motional behaviour of individuals’. While Debord discussed this concept in urban design, it nevertheless is highly applicable to analysing literary landscapes and emotions; for, the author is essentially the architect of their own work, where they can foreground the character’s emotion by appropriating the fictional landscape, thereby evoking the same emotions within the audience.
It therefore comes as little surprise that the protagonists of the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer should utter their elegiac monologue along and in hrimcealde sæ (‘an ice-cold sea’), and it is this paper’s goal to offer a psycho-geographical approach to this imagery in relation to the two narrator’s mental state. In particular, an icy sea combines two contrasting images in the form of two states of water: the static (ice) and the moving (waves), a dynamic that I will argue echoes the depiction of the narrators’ thoughts and memory, which are simultaneously locked in their brēostcofa (‘breast-coffer’, mind) and presented as moving pictures in front of the reader. Furthermore, I will read The Wanderer and The Seafarer as forming a sequence built on the same dynamic: while both narrators are grounded in the present (static: a ‘frozen’ moment in time), one looks nostalgically into the past, the other projects the present into the future (movement: the flow of time).
Chen Cui, University of Lausanne, Ca' Foscari University of Venice: “The Beowulf-Poet’s Symbiotic View on Human-Water Relationship: An Eco-Philological Interpretation”
This paper explores the Beowulf-poet’s sense of human-water symbiosis and synergy, illustrating the poet’s non-anthropocentric worldview through combined affective eco-criticism and kinesic analysis. I argue that writing about water is the process where the Beowulf-poet’s sense of self is oftentimes intersubjectively unfolded, rather than invariably performed through fully-fledged consciousness or subjectivity. The agentic water has the emotive power to disturb authorial cognition, thus rendering the cognitive-rhetorical process of writing more of affective than purely mimetic or representational. Juxtaposed narratives of nature and the body offer an entry point to retrieve how affective nature participates in the process of authorial simulation of human-nature reciprocity in medieval story-worlds. The narratives of Scyld’s sea burial, the swimming contest, and Grendel’s mother’s habitat will be perused to demonstrate how agentic water can infiltrate into the Beowulf-poet’s pre-reflective, embodied imagination of human-water symbiosis and interplay in the cultural context of early medieval North Atlantic.
Alexandra Ilina, University of Bucharest and Catalin Taranu, University of Bonn/ New Europe College, Bucharest: “The Binding Sea: Marine Emotions in Old French Lays and Old English Elegies”
Between mournful exiles by the sea in Old English elegies and knights lost at sea in
magical ships in Old French lays, there is a broad spectrum of emotional responses to
marine ecosystems in the medieval literature produced on both sides of the English channel. In our joint exploration of these aquatic affective landscapes, we aim to sketch a comparative account of emotion in two literary worlds bordering on the same ecological niche. Using an enactivist theoretical framework, whereby affects are
dynamic engagements with the environment and thus always already enmeshed with
the socio-ecological scaffoldings it arises from. In texts like the Old English Seafarer and Marie de France’s Guigemar, we see specific literary forms as both arising from
interactions between people and the marine environment they lived in, and as providing necessary cultural spaces for the mediation of emotional responses to specific aquatic ecologies.
13:00-14:30 Session 2: Water in Old Norse and Medieval French Texts
Chair: Minjie Su
Joshua C. Burgoyne, University of Oslo: “Sanguine or Sweet: Dew as a Transitional Motif in Grœnlendinga saga”
Dew (dǫgg) is a recurring literary motif in Grœnlendinga saga, where its bookend appearances serve as an allegorical gateway to Vínland. When Leifr Eiríksson and his crew first set foot on this new soil, they gather and drink sweet dew from the field. The scene’s imagery evokes a paradisical locus amoenus by drawing on medieval associations of dew as life-giving and sacred, reflecting both Christian and non-Christian belief, and, in a sense, welcoming these explorers to Vínland. Yet dew reappears in a different guise at the saga’s violent close; it coats Freydís’ feet prior to her betrayal of the brothers Helgi and Finnbogi. These wet feet wake her husband, Þorvarðr, who then massacres the brothers and their crew while Freydís herself takes up an axe to murder the women. The Norse explorers subsequently leave Vínland for the final time. This later depiction echoes skaldic kennings that link dew to blood, transforming the liquid’s symbolic role as a sign of paradise to a harbinger of bloodshed. I thus posit that dew serves as a transitional motif which depicts Vinland as a deceptive (and distinctly non-Christian) paradise: sweet at first, yet ultimately soaked in violence.
Jonas Koesling, University of Iceland: “… er-at hafs megin hǿgt at reyna” (‘... the power of the ocean is not easy to experience’): Mediaeval Icelandic–Norwegian Seas of Peril and Joy”
Images of fearless vikings (or rather víkingar) who put out to sea in order to seek adventure and spread terror dominate modern perceptions of Scandinavian people during the early Middle Ages. Indeed, we can find mediaeval tales, especially from Iceland, about seafarers who mockingly brave the waves and (literary) heroes who enter a wet grave with feelings of joy. Legendary sagas such as Friðþjófs saga frǿkna (from which the verse in the title) illustrate examples of the latter kind in elaborate saga-style and similar accounts can be found across the mediaeval Icelandic corpus of sagas and poetry. Yet, a much broader range of affective stances towards the sea is portrayed in these sources—even within a more limited case-study on the sea(s) between modern Norway and Iceland as depicted in different narratives such as the aforementioned and other works, for instance, Egils saga and Hákonar saga Hákonarson, which will form the basis of this paper. Starting with some impressions of perilous seas of loss and (near)shipwreck in such different writings, this paper will then proceed to investigate oceanic forces at work—on both cognitive/emotional and physical levels—stressing multi-faceted entanglements of mediaeval Scandinavians and more-than-human seas.
Meritxell R. de la Torre, University of Iceland: “La foldre et la tempeste”: Affective storms, rulership, and monstrosity in Mélusine (1393)”
This paper explores the intersection between emotion, monstrosity, rulership, and nature in the fourteenth-century French romance Mélusine. The romance was written by Jean d’Arras, at the behest of Jean de Berry in his claim to Poitou during the Hundred Years War. The story of Mélusine focuses on the founding mother of Lusignan, who, due to a curse imposed by her fairy mother, is forced to transform into a half-serpent, half-human figure every Saturday in her bath. After she is discovered by her husband, the lady flies away transformed into a giant serpent. The romance emphasises the connection between Mélusine and natural elements from the outset by placing her in waterways and forests at the beginning, and during her weekly transformation in her bath chambre. At the end of the romance, her connection with water is further reinforced when her emotive display as a serpent is equated to a terrible storm, capable of bringing down the castle at Lusignan. The aim is to establish how Mélusine’s connections to water affect the intradiegetic perception on the situations at play, as well as how it potentially connected with the socio-political context in which the story was first composed
14:45-16:15 Session 3: Water in Medieval and Early Modern Texts
Chair: Josh Burgoyne
Catherine-Rose Hailstone, Durham University: “Water, Water, Everywhere: Fluidity and Feeling in the pages of Gregory of Tours”
In 2017, Ellen Arnold published an article analysing the attitude of Bishop Gregory of Tours (November 30th 538 – November 17th 594) towards water and the natural environment. Focusing on the significance of rivers in the many books of Histories and Miracles that Gregory authored, Arnold argues that Gregory understood these natural bodies of water as sites of risk that needed to be managed through a combination of community action and recourse to saintly intervention. Building on the foundations laid by Arnold’s socio-environmental approach, this paper explores Gregory’s emotional relationship with water in its natural and spiritual forms. From rivers and lakes to tears, baptism, and medical cures, how did Gregory interact with water on an emotional level? What emotions did different waters inspire and what might this suggest about wider emotional perspectives to the natural environment and its elements in sixth-century Gaul?
Taran Palmstrøm Fenn, University of Oslo: “Rising Sea Levels and the Diagrammatic Order of Nature in Matthew Paris’ Chronicle Majora”
The Rollus Rubeus is a cartulary chronicle compiled in 1329. It preserves a documentary history of the diocese of Cefalù, containing privileges from the time of its foundation. Herein, it offers a crucial yet underexplored perspective on the cathedral’s relationship with the sea. This paper will examine how this is constructed through its remarkable opening passages: they describe a storm at sea in which Roger II, king of Sicily (r. 1105–1154) appeals to God and is miraculously saved, leading to the construction of a cathedral at Cefalù which he endows with rights over the maritime environment. The chronicle thereby embeds the cathedral’s foundation in an eco-emotional framework: it links maritime peril to religious devotion, and the assertion of coastal and marine rights over the environment. By situating this legend within a broader literary and historical framework, this paper will show – quite regardless of whether it describes a real event – how the source offers a rare case study for understanding how medieval institutions conceptualised such relationships. This is portrayed not only as an ecological reality but also as an emotional and political construct, highlighting a long-standing engagement with the sea as both a source of threat and economic prosperity.
Malte Damgaard Hansen, University of Oslo: “Sacred Water, Profane Water: Mobility and Emotion in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron”
This paper explores the interplay between water, mobility, and emotions in early modern literature, with a particular focus on the emotions tied to water as both a passage and a barrier in Marguerite de Navarre’s collection of novellas, Heptaméron. In the collection, the frame story substitutes the plague setting of Boccacio’s Decameron with a devastating flood in the Pyrenean borderlands, scattering travelers who had gathered at the baths of Cauterets. The frame story accounts of feelings of loss, weariness and dismay relating to the lack of mobility and waiting for the waters to recede. Many arduous journeys lead a group of noblemen to the abbey of Notre Dame de Sarrance, where they resort to storytelling as a means of enduring the waiting for a bridge to be built.
How does the Heptaméron depict the emotional relations to water, and how does this shape its storytelling strategies? Drawing on a blue humanities perspective on water’s agency (Mentz), I will offer reflections on the significances water holds in sixteenth-century literary culture, where it is not only a source of crisis but also a medium for reimagining storytelling, mobility, and emotional resilience.
Room 2: Loftet
10:15-11:45 Session 1: Water and Poetry
Chair: Ylva Østby Berger
Brandon Kaaz, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main: “Water and Fallout: the Blue Uncanny in Inger Christensen’s poem Alphabet (1981)”
Inger Christensen’s alfabet (1981) is a meticulously structured poetic meditation on Earth, destruction, and the uncanny rhythm of existence. My presentation explores the imagery of water, precipitation, and nuclear fallout in alfabet, focusing on their thematic and structural significance. Christensen’s snow falls ceaselessly, veiling the landscape in cold, melancholic tristesse, much like the nuclear past buried beneath the surface of history. Allusions to the Eniewetok Atoll – a site of 67 nuclear detonations between 1946 and 1958 in the middle of thePacific – highlight the paradox of concealment and exposure: a concrete dome covers radioactive debris, yet the sediment of the surrounding lagoon remains even more contaminated. The poem’s rigid form contrasts the liquid materiality of water, yet both paradoxically become mediums of erasure and revelation. The ocean, vast and indifferent, serves as both an ideal stage for human destruction and a looming threat as rising sea levels threaten to swallow the atoll.
In my presentation, I will examine how alfabet emits an uncanny atmosphere in the interplay of rhythm and the themes of water and destruction. This will illuminate how Christensen’s poetic form serves as a reminder of the tension between Earth’s resilience and the persistent reminders of human history.
Sylvain Briens, Sorbonne University: “RISE. Eco-emotions of Ice and Icebergs in Arctic Poetry”
Taking as my starting point a video-poem co-written by the Greenlandic poet Aka Niviana and the Marshall Islands poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner in 2018, entitled Rise, I will analyse how a performance based on the poetics of water invites us to link Greenland and the Marshall Islands as ‘sister of ice’ and ‘sister of sand’ in the same emotional confrontation with climate change. This four-handed writing by women poets from cultural worlds that are far apart, but who share the same planet and the same struggle to preserve it, is an appeal to rise up and mobilise public opinion through poetics of emotions. Drawing on the critical field of the Blue Humanities, which proposes to reverse the earth-centric understanding of the world by adopting an ocean-centric perspective, I will assess how transoceanic cultural ecosystems such as the Arctic contact zone are being formed around the same affective response to climate change. I will then read some poems of Arctic indigenous authors (Joan Naviyuk Kane, Liv Maria Róadóttir Jæger, Aqqaluk Lynge) with the Affect Theory Framework developed by Deonna & Teroni (2012) showing that emotions of ice reveals an unique aesthetic attitude based on oceanic « felt bodily stances ».
Yasuhiko Komatsu, Aoyama Gakuin University: “Rediscovering the Power and Soundscape of Urban Rivers: A Literary Perspective from Ancient to Modern Japan”
This paper aims to explore the emotions ancient Japanese people associated with rivers flowing through their capitals, compare these emotions with those depicted in modern novels, and examine the essential qualities of urban rivers from the literary viewpoint. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the only seventh-century poet to express strong emotions regarding the Asuka River in Asuka-kyo in Southern Nara Basin, vividly described its gemlike waterweed, likely caused by eutrophication due to urbanization. In contrast, many contemporary poets praised the pure visual and acoustic scenery of the Yosiho River, which flowed around the Imperial villa in the mountains. Eighth-century poets also praised the Saho River in Heijo-kyo in Northern Nara Basin, as they praised the Yoshino River, and they expressed preference for the calls of the Buerger's frogs,indicative of clean waters. In modern times, Shōhei Ōka fondly recalled the sounds of a river in Shibuya from his childhood, though most of these rivers are now culverted. Randy Taguchi highlighted the purifying effect of underground rivers amidst urban toxins. This paper argues that it is essential to rediscover the power and soundscape of rivers in urban environments, as they play a vital role in the cultural and ecological landscape of modern cities.
13:00-14:30 Session 2: Water, Science (fiction) and Magic
Chair: Tomine Sandal
Ingrid Eskild, University of Oslo: “Microscopic Marvels: Literary Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Water Microcosms”
In the mid-nineteenth century, the burgeoning field of microscopy unveiled previously unseen dimensions of the natural world. For example, depictions of water drops teeming with microbial life were widely circulated within thepopular press. These motifs – perfect circles replete with fantastical renderings of bacteria – sometimes in the form of little monsters – became icons, reprinted in periodicals all over Europe, reaching even Arabic and Russian journals. At the same time an aestheticization of a visual prosthetic (the microscope) and a fantasy-image of an unseen microcosm, this water-drop motif exemplifies the negotiations at work in ordering a scientific world-view that was by no means settled in the mid-nineteenth century. It served as a significant influence on contemporary fiction writers such as Fitz-James O'Brien and H.C. Andersen, who adapted the motif into literary metaphors of the scientist as alchemist and urban life as microbial messiness.
The literary adaptations of these images grappled with the duality of life depicted – its vitality and disorder contained within the neat boundaries of a microscopic lens, symbolizing unresolved negotiations in the scientific worldview of the era. This intersection of science and fiction highlights the evolving conceptualization of “life” during the nineteenth century, as writers mirrored the intricate yet ordered complexity found in scientific observations into literary narratives.
Solveig Gade, University of Copenhagen: “Staging Medieval Affects in Light of the Contemporary Climate Collapse”
Mermaids, mermen, nokks (water spirits), and winged beasts are among the many creatures that populate the medieval popular imagination of water. In Danish and Scandinavian folk ballads, particularly in those classified as magic ballads, these beings symbolize the untamed and perilious forces of nature. Often depicted as figures of temptation, they embody a seductive allure, and yileding to them can have fatal consequences for humans. Within the universe of the magic ballad, the element of water functions as both a portal and a threshold, separating the segregated human world from the chaotic, uncertain, and often supernatural realms of nature.
Against the background of the ongoing climate collapse, the musical performance titled Folkeviser (which premiered at the Danish Betty Nansen Theatre in 2025) set out to engage with the view on nature found in a group of medieval Danish magic ballads. As the dramaturge of the performance, I was co-responsible for selecting the ballads and for translating them into a contemporary framework, which investigated the continuties and discontinuities between medieval views on nature and those of the present. In this paper, I wish to focus particularly on the element of water as a portal to encounters between the human and the more-than-human. I will also home in on as to how the ”water-affiliated” emotions in the ballads – lust, freedom, shame, fear of social exclusion to name but a few –served as affective bridges linking past and present audiences.
Thomas Storey, Independent scholar: “Variations on Apocalypse: Water’s Role in the Dystopian FutureImaginary”
In the early 1960s JG Ballard published two novels that imagined possible apocalyptic futures. In both, water was the central element that, either through its excess or its deficit, determined the nature of these future worlds. In The Drowned World (1962), Ballard anticipated a future in which the polar ice caps have melted, leaving what is left of humanity to conduct a precarious fight for survival on the water. In The Burning World (1964), later published as The Drought, water has become scarce due to ocean pollution, leading to widespread desertification. These two futures can be considered paradigmatic models of apocalyptic science fiction, as is evident from the many examples of both flooded worlds and desert worlds in literature, television, and film. As climate change becomes increasingly acute, this duality in apocalyptic fiction is now mirrored in climate fiction, where it is taking on a more radical valence. This talk will trace the history and significance of these two possible futures, studying their contemporary manifestation and relevance to thinking through climate futures. What do such narratives tell us about the way in which water modulates the human-nonhuman relation? And what is the role of this water apocalypse tradition in climate change education, communication, and action?
14:45-16:15 Session 3: Water in Japanese Literature
Chair: Karin Kukkonen
Giulia Baqué, Tsuda University: “The Liquid World of Abe Kōbō: Affective Watery Imagination and Political: Anxieties in Inter Ice Age 4 (1959)”
In the novel Inter Ice Age 4 (Daiyon Kanpiōki 第四間氷期, 1959) by Japanese author Abe Kōbō 安部 公房(1924-1993), the liquid presence of waters and sea takes centre stage. The story reveals a future in which most of the continents have been submerged following the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of sea levels. Published in 1959, the novel mirrors the economic, social, and political insecurities dominating Japan during the Cold War. Simultaneously, the watery imagination and liquid world described by Abe, reveal the affective affordances emerging at the interconnection of socio-political concerns with more clearly ecological anxieties. In a world in which the solidity of ice and land has been replaced by sea, technology and the bio-engineering of new forms of life appear as the only way to survive a natural catastrophe for a country that has been living on ‘nature’s edge’ (Miller et al., 2013). Ultimately, this paper argues that Inter Ice Age 4 describes the affect of environmental catastrophes intertwined with the social and economic instability of the Cold War pointing to the risks of falling back on exploitative and extractive economic and social practices also in the aftermath of ecological disasters.
Emer O’ Dwyer, Oberlin College: “Sugiura Minpei’s Description of the 1953 Super-typhoon"
My proposed paper will examine author and activist Sugiura Minpei’s description of the 1953 super-typhoon that devastated Japan’s Atsumi Peninsula, a spit of land surrounded by the Pacific on one side and Ise and Mikawa bays on the others. “Minpei” (1913-2001)--a scholar of Italian Renaissance literature, practitioner of Japan’s classical tanka poetry, and after 1949, member of the Communist Party-- made a name for himself in the early 1950s as a key figure in the newly popular genre of “kiroku bungaku” or, reportage which characteristically combined thick description with finely drawn character portraits and the occasional literary flourish. A Chronicle of Typhoon #13 which Minpei published in 1955 features meticulous descriptions of the 1953 typhoon’s relentless force, with attention not only to the massive physical damage done on and around the peninsula but also to the consequences for residents’ sense of attachment to their individual environments and relations with one another in a landscape subject to frequent climate disturbance. Comparison will be made with Joseph Conrad’s classical 1902 novella, Typhoon in considering the ways that a super storm transforms the human communities and relationships that lie in its path.
Rebecca Suter, University of Oslo: “Breathing in a Puddle: Affective Responses to Water in Contemporary Japanese author Takase Junko”
At the beginning of Takase Junko’s novel Mizutamari de iki o suru (Breathing in a puddle, 2021), the protagonist’s husband suddenly refuses to shower, claiming that he finds the smell of chlorine in tap water unbearable. While most people interpret Kenji’s behaviour as a sign of mental illness, Izumi endeavours to engage with it in a more constructive way. She helps Kenji wash with bottled water and rainwater, and eventually she moves with him to her hometown in the countryside, near a pristine river. But water soon reveals yet another, even more threatening side, when prolonged torrential rain causes a major flood that kills Kenji. In the final scenes, the account of Izumi’s search for her missing husband under the rain blends with childhood memories of finding live fish in puddles after inundations, foregrounding the centrality of water to her own life trajectory. What seemed a simple dichotomy between the constraints of urban life, symbolised by chlorinated tap water, and a romanticised rural setting, represented by the river, turns into a parade of affective responses to water that highlights the complexity of human relationship with this element. Positioning Takase’s story within the context of the Japanese culture of bathing as well as Japanese representations of water in nature, this paper aims to investigate the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of water in Japanese literature, to reflect more broadly on affective responses to environmental change.
Keynote 2
16:30-17:30: Victoria Young: “The Sea is Her Story: An archipelagic approach to writing from Okinawa”
Chair: Rebecca Suter
The contemporary image of the islands of Okinawa is indelibly marked by the presence of the sea. In this keynote lecture, I will explore how expressions of the sea within works of literature from Okinawa engage with this association, not only as an incidental literary motif but as a potent critical tool. The seas surrounding Okinawa are indelibly marked by political conflict, evident in both the figurative appropriation of its “blue skies, blue seas” that dominate popular tourist perceptions, and the literal construction of a US military landing pad in the northern bay of Henoko. These struggles are powerfully reflected in the bodies of water within works of fiction by Sakiyama Tami (b. 1954), which are often rendered black, stagnant, and bottomless. This imagery satirises and subverts Okinawa’s idyllic subtropical image. It also constructs an alternative space for engaging with Okinawa’s distinctive and complex history of war, colonisation and occupation, and how these experiences have shaped its land, waters, and the voices that they carry.
To structure my analyses of Sakiyama’s fiction, I will draw on Imafuku Ryūta’s “archipelagic” worldview. A scholar of cultural theory, Imafuku roots his ideas in his fieldwork in Latin America and studies of Caribbean writers, and foregrounds the archipelago as an “anti-continental” means of connecting creolised identities, disrupting linear time, and decentering the mainland. In my lecture, I propose that Sakiyama’s writing resonates with Imafuku’s concerns by mining the turbulent potential of the sea as an alternative, female space from which individual narratives, unbound by the chronology of national history, might emerge. While interest in “border crossings” has grown within Japanese literary criticism and the burgeoning field of World Literature over the past three decades, this trend has often overlooked Okinawan texts or sidelined them to the margins. By bringing Sakiyama to the forefront, this approach aims to renegotiate the position of her stories within Japanese, and even global, literary mainstreams.
While focusing on Sakiyama Tami's writing, this keynote will also consider how her engagement with water and fluid identities resonates with other examples within the wider Okinawan and Japanese literary landscapes (and seascapes), such as the work of the “trans-border” author Tawada Yoko. This broader contextualization further underscores the enduring power of archipelagic thinking for challenging fixed notions of self and place, and for revealing latent connections between narratives that a more “landlocked” approach to literature threatens to conceal.
Victoria Young is the Kawashima Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Her research is motivated by questions of translation and decolonisation in Japanese and Okinawan literature, and the relationship between history and literature. Her latest book is Translation and the Borders of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Inciting Difference (London: Routledge, 2024).
September 5th Professorboligen
8.30-9.00: Coffee
Keynote 3
9:00-10:00: Tarek El-Ariss: “Against Nature”
Chair: Teresa Pepe
How do wars and crises reshape our theoretical frameworks regarding nature, water, and the environment? This talk examines a counter environmentalist narrative in crisis ridden countries. Starting with stories about collecting water in jars for bathing in war-torn Lebanon, I engage with the history and mythology of water and nature more generally from the garden of Eden to Greek and Islamic mythology focusing on representation of the oasis, greenery, and the environment. Drawing on psychoanalysis and affect theory, I argue that we come to environmental practices against our will, unconsciously, affectively. I conclude that while the relation to nature is one of control and containment, sustainability emerges as a form of negotiation and questioning of the power relations at the origin of discourses of nature, purity, and ethics.
Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his new book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War. Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies, he works across disciplines and languages to examine notions of the subject, community, and modernity. His research interests include Arabic literature, culture, and the arts; literary theory, new media, and digital humanities; Nahda and modernity studies; travel writing and the war novel; sci-fi and utopia studies; 18th- and 19th-century French philosophy and literature; and gender and sexuality studies. He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.
Room 1: Stallen
10:15-11:45 Session 1: Water and Life Experiences
Chair: Stefka G. Eriksen
Teresa Pepe, University of Oslo: “Life-Writing at the Water’s Edge: Growing up in the Nile Delta Region”
The Egyptian Delta, that spreads out in northern Egypt, from the northern district of Cairo to the Mediterranean shore, is the largest delta in the Mediterranean and it provides most of Egypt’s arable land. It is considered an extremely vulnerable geographical area, susceptible to erosion and climate changes, as shown by the growing number of sea floods that Alexandria and other coastal settlements have experienced in the last years (al-Ahram, October 2015).2
While this region has been studied mostly with focus on its rich cultural history (Blouin 2014), and the impact of anthropogenic changes to its landscape (Derr 2019, Mitchell 2011), I want to investigate what it means to grow up at the water’s edge, in a “landscape of crisis”, to borrow Serenella Iacovino’s definition, that is “a landscape of social fragmentation, of struggles and contradictions, often articulating political, cultural, ecological crises” (2016: 3). My primary sources consist of (literary) autobiographies by authors who have grown up in this region during the XX century, namely: The Education of Salama Musa (Tarbiyyat Salama Musa, 1961) by the modernist intellectual Salama Musa, And the Train Comes (Wa-yaʾti al-qitar), by Muhammad al-Bisati, (1999), The Seven Days of a Man (Ayyam al-Insan al-Sabaʿ) by Abd al-Hakim Qasim (1969), Wonders of Chilhood (Awaʾil ziyarat al-dahsha, 1997) by the poet Muhammad ʿAfifi Matar and The Cotton Plantation Remembered (2013) by the sociologist Mona Abaza. In these texts, human and non-human elements coexist in a society whose rhythm is set by floods, rituals, pilgrimages, and the ecological disruptions brought by colonial modernity, such as the introduction of the railways and the building of the High Dam.
The lens of ‘eco-autobiography’, as defined by Peter F. Perreten (2003) seems particularly enlightening, not a genre per se, but rather as a way of reading that pays attention to the symbiotic relationship between the place portrait – the textures and histories of the landscape - and the “literary self-portrait,” of the author.
Karin Kukkonen, University of Oslo: “Stacked Ecologies: Temporal and Tidal Waves in Beach Reading”
The ecology of water provides a classical setting that is often forgotten when thinking about environmental approaches to literature : reading during on the beach. Taking the specific case of beach reading and Sara Stridsberg’s recent novel Farewell to Panic Beach (Farväl til Panic Beach, 2025) as my starting point, I will discuss links between different ecologies involved in reading. First, literary texts represent ecologies through the settings and character constellations of their storyworlds. Second, literary texts themselves draw on extended cognition in writing and reading, and they are material artefacts that invite manipulation in different ways, emerging from a particular media ecology. Third, literary texts are often read within specific spaces, such as libraries, or within specific natural ecologies, such as reading on the beach. These ecologies are “stacked,” I argue, and I will analyse the different “waves” represented and embodied in the three ecologies to track how the reading process in language, narrative and embodied experience moves between them.
Sylvie Dagallier, Sorbonne University: “By the water and with the water: emotional responses to inflicted and suffered violence”
How can an anthropocentric perspective be shifted to foreground the role of water? This paper analyzes three contemporary Norwegian fictions to explore original portrayals of water as a catalyst for eco-emotions associated with both inflicted and endured violence. Far from being a mere backdrop, water functions as an actant (Latour 2007) or a partner, fostering emotions that are central to the narrative.
First, we consider water as an indirect actant, whose agency in Vi kan ikke ta vare på alt by Hjemås and En heldig løsning by Midthun violently destabilizes habitable spaces and triggers a spectrum of emotional responses ranging from denial to resignation. Landslides caused by relentless rain induce psychological disorientation and elicit reactions to “the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land” (Latour, 2017, my translation).
Violence is also inflicted upon water, rendering it as much a victim as humans. Thus, Landmark’s novel Til slutt blir du selvlysende portrays the narrator’s psychological collapse, resulting from both postpartum depression and plastic pollution affecting the water, her body, and her child’s body in the same way. Drawing on Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality and sea (2014), this analysis underscores the anguish of humans as interconnected members of a deteriorating ecosystem.
13:00-14:30 Session 2: Water in Children Literature and Graphic Novels
Chair: Rebecca Suter
Ingvild Boberg, University of Oslo: “Disruption, Trauma, and Healing in Picture Books About the Tôhoku: Earthquake and Tsunami, 2011”
In this talk, I will be discussing how three picture books about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (sometimes known as the Great East Japan Earthquake or 3.11 in Japan), and how they depict the ocean, both before, during, and after the tsunami. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter’s scale occurred in the ocean off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan. The earthquake caused a tsunami with waves as tall as 130 feet that devastated large parts of the coastline, particularly in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. As of 2021, the official death toll is close to 20,000 people.
Natural disasters like the Tohoku tsunami challenges our ideas about things and places that we often think of as safe; the water that laps against the pier is just a normal part of daily life by the shore. A tsunami unsettles this notion, turning nature into something actively destructive, flooding beaches and rivers and towns. The picture books I will be discussing all present the reader with this duality, showing the ocean by turns as a bringer and destroyer of life, and attempting to help the reader reconcile the two. My talk draws on ecocriticism, blue humanities, trauma theory, and waste studies, as well as existing literary theory around the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, particularly the work of Rachel DiNitto.
Elizaveta Khachaturyan, University of Oslo: “Water Imagery in a Russian Children's Novel from the 20th Century: Between 19th Century Traditions and New Tendences”
In 19th-century Russian literature, water plays two important roles. First, starting with Pushkin’s fairy tale about the Fisherman and the Fish (1833), sea water is used to depict emotional states, escalating from 'being calm' to 'becoming furious. Second, in the second half of the 19th century, the river becomes a setting for social conflicts: a place of entertainment for the rich and a place of work for the very poor. I will show how these two traditional images of water are re-elaborated in a famous children’s novel Dinka by Valentina Oseeva (1959). This is a fictional narrative set in early 1900s Russia and based on real events from the author’s biography. The rivers, Volga and Dnepr, become important places in the plot and in describing the characters’ evolution. They are utilized on several levels in the story narrated, assuming aesthetic, metaphoric, and ethical dimensions: 1) in describing the girl’s difficult relationships with other people and conveying her various emotional states; (2) in depicting the social oppositions characterizing Russian society before the revolution of 1917; and (3) in illustrating different attitudes toward new places and spaces where the main characters move and act.
Bidisha Banerjee, University of Hong Kong: “Resisting Necro Hydrology: The Mediterranean as Affect”
Often called the world’s deadliest migration route, the Mediterranean has become the site of a European, necropolitical strategy of migration deterrence. An estimated 25,500 migrants have perished in the depths of the Mediterranean since 2000. Several recent refugee graphic novels tell harrowing stories of the treacherous journeys migrants undertake in order to reach “Fortress Europe.” These include novels like Sergio Nazzaro and Luca Ferrara’s Mediterraneo, depicting a barren Mediterranean Sea where the waters have receded to lay bare all that the sea has hidden until now, and Armin Greder’s The Mediterranean which considers the “food chain” of aquatic migration where bodies sink to the bottom of the sea only to be consumed by the fish that may end up on our dinner tables. Still others document a child’s journey as they cross the Mediterranean– Ebo in Illegal (Colfer, Donkin and Rigano 2018), and Amina in Zenobia (Durr and Horseman 2018). In the context of refugee migrations, the sea becomes a space with shifting boundaries, a contradictory space of capture and rescue, of stasis and mobility. Through an analysis of some of these graphic novels, this paper will explore the affective use of the Mediterranean to critique the weaponization of the sea by European governments in their prevention through deterrence policy. These graphic novelists portray “the more than human hydrocommons” (Neimanis, 2017) resulting from the human/more-than-human comingling between the abject migrant and the ravaged environment that call into questions notion of borderization and environmental extraction.
14:45-16:15 Session 3: Water, Energy and Climate Change
Chair: Sissel Furuseth
Tomine Sandal, University of Oslo: “Ocean, oil and illness: Sara Sølberg’s Seismiske smell (2016)”
The novel Seismiske smell (Seismic bangs, 2016) by the Norwegian author Sara Sølberg is a multifaceted story about physical and mental illness, extractivism and pollution, loss and grieving, in which the narrator’s human body is woven narratively together with the ocean and the creatures inhabiting it. In this paper, I use Stacy Alaimo’s term trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010) to discuss how Sølberg’s novel explores trans-corporeal relations between the human body, the sea and extractivism (particularly oil – the title of the novel alludes to seismic surveys that are used when searching for promising offshore oil sites). In addition to examining corporeal and affective responses to environmental change in Seismiske smell, the paper also argues that the novel can be read as an example of what Heather Houser terms “ecosickness fiction”, which refers to literature characterized by “narrative affects that draw conceptual homologies between environmental and somatic vulnerability” (Houser 2014, 3). The paper shows how the novel explores contact zones and flows between the narrator’s own disease-ridden body and other life forms that reside in the ocean, and how Sølberg weaves together the narrator’s physical and mental medical condition with that of oceanic life forms, and ultimately the planet’s ecological emergencies.
Arash Dehghani, independent scholar: “Echoes of the Waves: Reimagining the Abadan Petroleum Landscape”
Abadan, an island situated in southwestern Iran, is a port and refinery city encircled by the Bahmanshir and Shatt al-Arab (Arvand) rivers at the head of the Persian Gulf. The erection of the world's largest refinery at the time in the 1910s transformed its cultural fabric and social structures, turning it from agricultural land into a petro-metropolitan. In decades that followed, these transformations led writers of the Southern school of Iranian literature to explore the ecological and social ramifications of oil. The main themes of this literature are labour, land, and water.
This paper examines the figure of the jashoo (bargee/seaman) in this literary tradition to explore how the seaman’s relationship with water and the perspective of the island from the water can propose a new imaginary of an island whose imagery is saturated with oil.
Jenna Coughlin, St. Olaf College: “The Music of Water: Sound and Emotions in Norwegian Responses to Hydropower”
Industrial hydropower development transformed Norwegian watersheds beginning in the early 1900s. This process escalated in the second half of the 20th century, as electrification became a key strategy for promoting economic growth after World War II. Using intermedial ecocritical methods, this paper traces visual, textual, and auditory references to music in three different eras of hydropower: The earliest industrial dams of the 1910s, when hydropower announced the arrival of modernity to rural Norway; the decades after World War II, when support for hydropower was at its height, and the Mardøla protest in 1970, when environmentalists began to connect hydropower to imperialism and human rights abuses. I analyze how the painting Draugens sorg by Niels Bergslien (ca. 1909), the essay “Ved tunnelgapet” by Tarjei Vesaas (1958), and the film Kampen om Mardøla (1972), each convey a water imaginary in which rivers are understood as sources of creativity and cultural continuity. This shared water imaginary, however, is associated with different emotional responses in each era, ranging from sorrow to ambivalence to horror. This paper suggests the importance of art, literature, and film in conveying and shaping cultural imaginaries of water in response to energy technologies and their changing significance and use.
Room 2: Loftet
10:15-11:45 Session 1: Rain, Sea and Waves in Literature
Chair: Inger Østenstad
Camilla Hougaard, Aarhus University: “The rain has turned the peninsulas into a kind of devil’s gutter”: Haunted Waterscapes in Rasmus Theisen’s Molbohistorier (2023)”
How do contemporary narratives engage with the challenges of representing life in flooded, climate-disrupted landscapes? In Molbohistorier (2023), it rains continuously for an entire year. This paper argues that the resulting flood—caused by the relentless downpour—functions both as archive and agent: it carries layers of history and myth, while also intensifying the social tensions of the local community. Although geographically confined to southern Djursland—the “booger” of Denmark’s nose— the novel unfolds a series of haunted and overlapping waterscapes that extend beyond the local:
- - The dystopian (or dystop-ish) rain-soaked, where the rain exacerbates social deprivation and mistrust.
- - The historically haunted, where Kolindsund—once drained as part of a large-scale land reclamation project in the mid-to-late 19th century—reemerges as wetland, exploited by an opportunistic oyster farmer.
- - The mythologically overexposed, where the narrator moralizes by framing the climate crisis as “the world’s greatest molbo story”—a construction that draws on both St. St. Blicher’s storytelling and the biblical Flood.
Together, these landscapes form a distinctive temporality in which past, present, and future merge—a condition Tobias Menely describes as the “representational intractability” of climatic temporality (Menely 2012, 479). Just as “time loses its outline” (ibid., 489), the flood erases not only the contours of Viktor’s homeland but also the rhythms and meaning of his everyday life. In Molbohistorier, the climate crisis is not portrayed as a linear event, but as a tidal condition marked by haunting, repetition, and distortion. The novel reflects a broader tendency in contemporary Danish literature to explore the intersection of climate change, landscape, and human experience. Here, change and rootedness exist in tension, as the emotional and existential displacements triggered by climate disruption continually emerge.
Auður Aðalsteinsdóttir, University of Iceland: “‘A Sea Without Direction’ a hydrofeminist reading of contemporary Icelandic poetry”
Nature is often depicted as traumatic in Icelandic literature, highlighting how vulnerable people are to danger from external forces but also from within. The sea, with its eternal transition and movement, is a place of especial ambivalence and contradictions; a source of life-giving food as well as a graveyard of numerous fishermen, and symbolically a deep from which traumas resurface.
This paper argues that imagery of the deep in some recent Icelandic poetry reflects how climate related traumas are slowly sinking into the depths of our collective unconscious, but also a posthuman worldview where creatures of the sea are used to explore complex interactions in Earth’s critical zone. This is done through a hydrofeminist reading of the micro-story “Skepnan” (“The Beast”) by Þórdís Helgadóttir, Urta, a story poem by Gerður Kristný which describes a relationship between a woman and a female seal, and poems by Haukur Ingvarsson on “sinkings” and the Greenland shark, swimming in “a sea without direction”.
Anna Street, Le Mans University: “Waves of Ice: Eco-Emotions of the Feminine Aquatic in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves”
This paper will analyze how the symbolism of waves is operative in provoking eco-emotions in Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves while reading Stefan Helmreich’s study on the gender of waves to explore how the novel and Woolf’s own death have contributed to evolving associations of water with women. This will lead to an overview of the emerging notion of hydrofeminism and its links to ecofeminism and the insistence by a growing number of global initiatives that today’s water crisis is a women’s crisis. We will examine the ways in which Western literature (from Shakespeare to Woolf) has associated the feminine with the aquatic, submerging and silencing women via highly aestheticized drowning scenes, before encouraging women to swim back to the shore and survive. Lastly, we will analyze how the staging of Woolf’s novel using ice puppets by the company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert amplifies the emotional impact of the spoken text. Water’s protean characteristics capable of performative mutations maintain a privileged relation to both emotion and femininity, the latter often accused of excessive displays of emotion by way of tears. In short, this paper will examine how the age-old association of women with water impacts contemporary framings of ecological sensibility.
Keynote 4
16:45-17:45: Ellen Marie Krefting: “Affected by the Ocean”
Chair: Stefka G. Eriksen
From the 17th century onwards, modern Western maritime cartography has depicted the ocean as empty, inert, passive, and orderly—an abstract space to navigate, control, occupy, and exploit. While schematic representations became essential to safer navigation, they could never suspend sailors’ disorderly and lived experience of the material reality, the unpredictable and restless oceanic element. In the lecture, I will explore this duality by examining the life and works of Johan Heitmann, an 18th-century Norwegian captain and cartographer who also authored what can be termed an emotional literary oceanscape. In his book offering advice and prayers to “simple sailors”, he portrayed the ocean as a natural environment imbued with profound spiritual, moral, and emotional meaning. First published in 1730, the book provided consolation for generations of seafarers affected by the elemental forces of the ocean in their daily lives—continuing to resonate well into the 20th century.
Ellen Marie Krefting is a professor of the history of ideas at the University of Oslo, specializing in the 18th century. Currently, she is PI of the project “Maritime Modernities: Formats of Oceanic Knowledge,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council. She is co-authoring a forthcoming book on the intellectual history of the ocean (title: Havet. En idéhistorie, Kagge, September 2025) with Gard Paulsen.
