What are you working with at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
I am currently working on a PhD project titled "Paradise Found: Environmental Rhetoric in Old Norse and English Translations of the Vínland Sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga.” The project is an eco-critical study of the Vínland sagas, two medieval travel narratives which depict Norse expeditions to North America. I am essentially gathering verbs, in the aim of understanding how the sagas depict interactions between nonhuman entities and humans.
Literature is a means of connecting with the past—under an ecological framework, historical literatures offer thrilling insights into how past cultures engaged with the nonhuman. The nature/culture dichotomy that we know today is a relatively recent concept. Medieval perspectives weren’t as focused on dualisms. The Vínland sagas especially serve as a window into this blending between human and environment. Their focus on themes of exploration and settlement brings landscape, animal, and artifact to center stage; they become, in a way, active participants in the plot. For example, when a group of Norsemen attempt to sail the Greenland Sea for the first time, a myriad of entities play a role: the ship, its sails, the wind, sea waves, the sailors and their captain, even the land come together to accomplish this navigational feat. Most of the previous research on these sagas ignores the importance of this interconnectedness and these nonhuman entities to focus on humanist themes—they have been examined from archaeological, philological, and even colonial perspectives. By shining a light on the vital impact that other actors and artifacts have on the narrative, I aim to change that.
What activity or aspect about Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
I am very excited about the interdisciplinary approach Eco-Emotions has. It’s so cool to see academics form various fields come together to explore literature. How often do cognitive psychologists, contemporary literature scholars, and Old Norse philologists get to work together so closely? The seminars inspire diverse reflections, which provides ample opportunities to learn from these different perspectives. Community building is essential when facing something like climate change, and Eco-Emotions promotes connection—and cooperation—between academic communities. I’m still learning, of course, and am excited to deepen my own knowledge of ecological theory in a group that facilitates collaboration across disciplines under this ecological framework.
What do you currently read for pleasure?
I recently completed "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a speculative science-fiction novel about the last humans who escape from a dying Earth and try to find a new habitable planet. The only one they find, however, is already inhabited by cognitive spiders. The book explores what it means to be a "civilized being," with the spiders existing in their environments in unique, yet emotionally comparable ways to their human counterparts. It’s wild!
Another book I'm enjoying is Annie Dillard’s "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," a piece of creative nonfiction about the author’s explorations and observations around her neighborhood and the surrounding woods over a year. I’ve read it a few times, and it gets better with every read. The book focuses on the things that Dillard sees and feels while in nature—a big theme is that seeing nature, really looking, is akin to knowing it. She writes like a poet with the mind of a naturalist, showing that nature is imperfect, harsh and cyclical, a beautiful god that doesn’t care, contrary to the idealism with which it is often portrayed in literature.