I'm so glad you asked!
I'm now the fifth year of my PhD, which means that I am dissertating. My project is focused in Scandinavia, exploring the ways that the availability of certain materials, both local and acquired through long distance trade, impacted art production in the Middle Ages. Each of my dissertation chapters focuses on a different medieval material: gold, antler, wood and ivory.
I'm in Iceland to work on the chapter of my dissertation about wood. Timber was a major resource for medieval Norwegians, and wood carving the key artistic output. Churches were wood, sculpture was wood, and the country was covered in rich forests. However, when the Vikings (many of whom were Norwegian, though it was a quite diverse group from all over) settled in Iceland, they rapidly deforested the subarctic island. My chapter explores the ways that meanings around wood and wood carving might be different in Norway, where wood was plentiful, and Iceland, where it was not. This leads to drastic differences in art production in the two spaces that are rooted in similar cultural traditions.
While in Iceland, I'll be working at the Institute for Icelandic Manuscript Studies in Reykjavik, as well as the National Museum, continuing my research and drafting (hopefully!!) my chapter. I will have a major presentation for my department at Penn in March--this is the most important right of passage in the PhD.
This research will be supported by the Fulbright-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Grant and the Leífur Eiricksson Fellowship.
