Karen Oslund

Current Position

Assistant Professor of World History, Towson University, Towson, Maryland
(from August, 2006-

Previous Experience

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)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park.
(academic year 2002-03)
Adjunct Professor, Department of Social Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn (January-May, 2002)
Managing Editor of Isis, the international journal for the history of science and its cultural influences, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University (January, 2001-March, 2002)
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching-Research Fellow, Society for the Humanities and the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University (academic year 2000-01)

Education

2000 Ph.D., Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles
Examination Fields: European Cultural and Intellectual History, History of Science, and Comparative History
Dissertation Title: Narrating the North: Scientific Exploration, Technological
Innovation, and Colonial Politics in the North Atlantic Islands
1994 M.A., Department of History, UCLA
1992 B.A., with Honors, Department of History, UCLA

Publications

Monograph and Edited Collections:

North Atlantic Narratives: Travel, Nature, and Cultural Identity in Iceland, Greenland, Norway, and the Faroe Islands, under review with the University of Washington Press.
The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context, 1740-1940 (co-edited with David Hoyt), Rowman & Littlefield, to appear in October 2006.
Teaching World History (co-edited with Eckhardt Fuchs), special issue of the journal World History Connected, volume 3, issue 3, available at: http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Environment (co-edited with Niels Brimnes, Christina Folke Ax, and Niklas Thode Jensen)
Selected Articles in Peer Reviewed Journals and Books:
"Reading Backwards: Language Politics and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia," in The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context, 1740-1940, Hoyt and Oslund, eds. (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), pp. 115-145.
"Protecting Fat Mammals or Carnivorous Humans?: Towards An Environmental History of Whales," special issue of Historical Social Research: Umweltgeschichte in der Erweiterung/The Frontiers of Environmental History, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004), pp. 63-81.
"’Nature in League with Man’: Conceptualising and Transforming the Natural World in Eighteenth-Century Scandinavia," Environment and History, vol. 10, no. 3 (August 2004), pp. 305-25.
"Umbreyting og framfarir: Samanburðarrannsókn á byggðunum við Norður-Atlantshaf á tímum upplýsingarinnar," ("Enlightenment Ideas of Transformation and Progress: A Comparative Study of the North Atlantic") Saga: tímarit Sögufélags, vol. 41, no. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 67-90 (in Icelandic, with an English summary).
"Imagining Iceland: Narratives of Nature and History in the North Atlantic," The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 35, no. 3 (September 2002), pp. 313-34.

Selected Book Reviews:

Günther Sollinger, S. A. Andrée: The Beginning of Polar Aviation, 1895-1897, forthcoming in Technology and Culture.
John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World, in Technology and Culture (October 2004), vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 861-62.
Anna Agnarsdóttir, ed., Voyages and Explorations in the North Atlantic from the Middle Ages to the XVII Century, in Saga: tímarit Sögufélags (Spring 2004), vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 251-53.
David Thomas Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World: A History, 1870-1940, in Isis, an International Journal for the History of Science and its Cultural Influences (September 2003), vol. 94, no. 3, pp. 547-49.
Susan Kollin, Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier, in Environmental History (January 2003), vol. 8, no. 1, p. 154.
Charles Officer and Jake Page, A Fabulous Kingdom: The Exploration of the Arctic, in Isis (December 2002), vol. 93, no. 4, p. 674.
Selected Fellowships and Awards
Morgan and Jeanne Sherwood Travel Grant to attend the Annual Conference of the American Society for Environmental History (2003 meeting).
Dissertation Fellowship, Department of History, UCLA (academic year 1999-2000).
Guest Researcher, Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany (spring-summer 1999).
Danish-American Fulbright Commission Award for Study in Denmark for research as a guest Ph.D. student at the Institute for Archaeology and Ethnology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (academic year 1996-97).
Travel Grant for Study in Great Britain, Center for the Cultural Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine, UCLA (summer 1996).
Student of Icelandic, Sigurður Nordal Institute, Reykjavík, Iceland (summer 1995).
Chancellor's Fellowship, Department of Germanic Literature and Languages, UCLA (academic year 1994-95).
Recent Conference, Workshop, and Paper Presentations
"'The North Begins Inside': The Past as Prologue in Icelandic Tourist Literature and Travel Narratives, 1944-," conference Managing the Post-Colonial Experience, conference sponsored by the Network for Global Cultural Studies, Mols, Denmark, August 30-31, 2006.
"Whales as Citizens of the World: The Global and Local in the New Politics of Nature Protection," invited paper in the Department of History, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, March 7, 2006.
"Of Whales and Men: The North Atlantic as a Place of Contested Scientific Ethics and Cultural Politics," conference Images of the North: Histories, Identities, Ideas, Reykjavík, Iceland, February 24-26, 2006
Chair and Commentator for the Panel, Writing Outside the West: Language Study and Nation in China and Eastern Europe, at the American Historical Association annual meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 5-8, 2006.
"Homeland or Wilderness? Danish Conceptions of Greenland and its Inhabitants, 1721-1925," panel Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism, at the Nordic Society for Environmental History Conference, Turku, Finland, September 15-17, 2005.
"The Rights of Fat Mammals and Carnivorous Humans: the Politics of Whales in the North Atlantic," invited paper at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., April 29, 2004 and at Environmental History and the Oceans, conference organized by the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. and the University of Southern Denmark, Copenhagen, June 2-5, 2004.
"Shaping and Reading Iceland: Technological and Cultural States as seen by 18th and 19th
Century Travelers to Iceland," Saga og tækni: Misgengi samfélags og tækniþróunar á Íslandi/History and Technology: fault lines between social and technological development in Iceland, conference of the History of Technology Society at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland, March 18-19, 2004.