Very few Canadian graduate students take classes in Iceland. With support from the Network in Canadian History & Environment, five graduate students from Canadian universities traveled to the North Atlantic island country this past June for a special environmental history summer school in Iceland led by faculty from the Reyjkavik Academy. The school included a total of 12 participants, including famed American environmental historian Donald Worster.
The summer school participants have done a very fine job bringing their experience in Iceland to a wider community of environmental historians through the NiCHE website. While the NiCHE website hosts a number of impressive conference and workshop feature pages, including the Hacking as a Way of Knowing Workshop and the Canadian History & Environment Summer School, this new page offers an excellent model for future projects of this kind.
The Svartárkot Workshop website provides a succinct summary of the events, a complete list of the workshop readings, audio recordings of the lectures, a picture gallery, and a finely detailed annotated map, overlaid with photos. If you weren’t one of the fortunate 12 participants, I would encourage readers to visit the Svartárkot Workshop website.
In particular, I think Donald Worster’s two lectures will appeal to those with an interest in environmental history:
Donald Worster, “Knowing Nature: Science and Environmental History”, June 2009.
Donald Worster, “Darwin, Evolution, and Food”, June 2009.
