Ithaca College

On August 28th, Michael Twomey (Dana Professor Emeritus, English) presented a lecture titled “Practicing Ecocriticism” in the Svartárkot Culture/Nature program at Kiðagil, Bárðardalur, Northern Iceland. In the photo at right, Twomey is pictured with Steven Hartman (IC English, 1987), who also lectured in the Svartárkot program.

Twomey’s lecture provided an overview of developments in ecocriticism (also known as environmental criticism) from its origin to the present, with a focus on the project “Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas.”  This project compares the evidence of literary and historical records with research in environmental history, geography, ecology, and archaeology in order to understand the impact of climate change in Iceland from its settlement in the ninth century down to the present—which corresponds to the “Medieval Climate Optimum” through the “Little Ice Age” and on into the current period of global climate change.  Students in the program were from Canada, Britain, and the United States. 

At Kiðagil, Twomey also contributed to a planning session of the ICECHANGE project (full name: “Förändringens reflektioner: Naturen i litterära och historiska källor från Island ca. 800 till 1800 / Reflections of Change: The Natural World in Literary and Historical Sources from Iceland ca. AD 800 to 1800”).  ICECHANGE is a multi-national project undertaking systematic analysis of weather, climate and other environmental information in Icelandic literature, encompassing historiographic, literary and normative documents from the early medieval period to about 1800. The project will illuminate ongoing work on the environmental history of Iceland, and it will lay the foundation for a larger research program with a similar focus extendable throughout the North Atlantic region.  ICECHANGE is funded by the Rijsbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden, and it is led by Steven Hartman (IC English, 1987) of Mälardalen University, Sweden, and by Astrid Ingrid Ogilvie of the Stefansson Arctic Institute, University of Akureyri, Iceland.