Ithaca College

Michael Twomey (English; Dana Professor) and Steven Hartman (English, 1987; now professor and director of the Ecohumanities Hub, Mid Sweden University) collaborated in an environmental humanities workshop that took place at the Sigtuna Foundation in Sigtuna, Sweden, this past November 12th through 16th.

The workshop was sponsored by the Norse Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES), whose home base is now the Sigtuna Foundation, and by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation (NABO).

For five days, the thirty-one participants worked in teams that mapped out new integrative, collaborative research projects bringing together the fields of literature, history, environmental history, legal history, archeology, climate science, biology, geography, and computerized data management.  Steven, who is the director of NIES and the leader of the Bifrost environmental film-making project, led the Inscribing Environmental Memory (IEM) team, which is co-sponsored by NABO.  He and Michael collaborated with experts in environmental history, Icelandic literature, Icelandic law, and archeology who came to Sigtuna from the USA, Iceland, and Sweden.

The IEM team produced outlines for several projects about Icelandic environmental history, of which Steven and Michael will be involved in three that are already committed for publication:  a theoretical and methodological “manifesto” about interdisciplinary environmental humanities; an article on the literary, historical, legal, and archeological evidence of the ecologies of Mývatn and Strandir; and a book chapter about using literature, historiography, and archeology to understand land management practices in Norse settlements during the Viking era.

Sigtuna, founded in 970, is the oldest continuously-existing town in Sweden.