Karen Oslund
Karen is a professor of world history at Towson University. Since 1995, she has been studying the global Arctic and sub-Arctic, with a particular focus on environmental history, colonialism and postcolonialism. She has authored Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic, co-edited two volumes in global colonial history and translated two Icelandic sailors’ journals of voyages to China.
Sailing out of time: whalers, Inuit and dislocation in the 19th century Arctic
Karen’s project examines temporal disconnection at the sites of whaling ships frozen into the Arctic in the 19th century and how the emotional meaning of this dislocation impacted these sailing communities and the world these ships supplied with energy. Temporarily or permanently stranded in the Arctic, these whalers were cut off from the time from which they came and from the marking of time to which they contributed by producing whale oil for lighting around the globe. This stranding and its time-sense was carried to the modern world at the end of the whaling season as an emotional resonance of the Arctic, which impacted the understanding of the Arctic and the consumption of its resources in the interconnected modern world.
Have a look at Karen’s research poster about her project.