A full schedule of events:

Please email Mark Netzloff (netzloff@uwm.edu) for zoom links for all events.

Thursday, 2/25, 3:30-5:00, public lecture: “A Humanist in the Northwest Passage,” with a reception to follow (5:00-6:00).

Friday, 2/26, 11:00-12:00: meeting with graduate students.

Friday, 2/26, 12:00-1:00: brown bag discussion of pre-circulated essay, “I, Nuligak and Indigenous Arctic Temporalities,” in conjunction with C21.  Please email Mark Netzloff (netzloff@uwm.edu for a copy of the essay.

Hester Blum is a Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.  Her work, which traverses nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture and environmental humanities, focuses on oceanic and polar studies, book history and material text studies, Herman Melville, and nineteenth-century prose.  She is the author of The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Duke, 2019), The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (North Carolina, 2008), and is currently at work on two new book projects: Ice Ages, about the temporalities of ice in an epoch of anthropogenic climate change, and Castaways, a meditation on “female Robinson Crusoes.”

“A Humanist in the Northwest Passage”:

In the summer of 2019, Hester Blum was the lone humanist on a scientific expedition tracking climate change in the Northwest Passage. Drawn from her experience on the icebreaker, Blum’s talk offers a meditation on ice as a measure for visualizing, writing about, mourning, and mediating the state of the climate in an age of ecological and institutional crisis.