Faculty

Karen Oslund

Associate Professor of History

Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2000

Karen Oslund studies Scandinavia and the global Arctic, 1750-present, with particular focus on environmental history. She is the author of Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (University of Washington Press, 2011).

Dr. Oslund is currently working on a project titled “Survival and Adaptation in Arctic Environments: Modern and Traditional Whaling in the Arctic, 1850-1920,” a comparative study of whaling in Danish Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, and the Russian North.

Selected Publications

• Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (University of Washington Press, 2011)
• The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context, 1740-1940 (co-edited with David Hoyt), Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
• Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies (co edited with Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, and Niklas Thode Jensen), Ohio University Press, 2011.

Recent Lectures and Presentations

• “North Atlantic Whaling: A Case Study for Global Whaling Politics?” paper at the American Society for Environmental History conference, Phoenix, Arizona, April 13-17, 2011.
• ”Whales and Whalers--Arctic Travelers and Arctic Inhabitants: A History of Whaling Cultures and their Contemporary Politics,” invited paper for the Arctic Perspectives Conference, Naryan Mar, Russia, June 24-26, 2010.

Awards and Honors

• Research Fellowship from the Rachel Carson Center for the Study of Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, for 2012-2013
• College of Liberal Arts Summer Research Grant, Towson University, Summer 2011
• Research Fellow in Environmental History, German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.,
  (academic years 2004-2006)
• Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow in International Studies, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (academic year 2003-04)