Member Bio
Karen Oslund is a historian, interested in whaling, indigenous hunting, and international environmental regulation. Her book, Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (University of Washington Press in 2011), deals with the European exploration and writing about Iceland from the middle of the eighteenth century, and ends with a discussion of contemporary Icelandic whaling practices and the controversy surrounding them. Oslund received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles, and has also studied at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Iceland. In her current project at the Rachel Carson Center, Survival and Adaptation: Modern and Traditional Whaling in the Arctic, 1850–1920, she is working on Greenlandic, North American, and Russian whaling in the global Arctic.