Jan Borm, director of the Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ (MIARC) has been invited to give a guest lecture within the framework of the Nordic Blue Humanities guest lectures series at Sorbonne University / École pratique des hautes études in Paris on 26 April 2024.
Jean Malaurie (1922-2024), France's most distinguished Arctic scholar of the past 70 years, has repeatedly written about whale hunts, notably in the Bering Strait, basing himself on his own field campaigns in Beringia and his studies of the region's ethnohistory. The lecture will focus notably on passages from his four-volume account Hummocks (1999) republished as the The Whale Alley (2003).
The lecture series Nordic Blue Humanities is organized by Sylvain Briens, Professor of literature and cultural history of the Scandinavian countries at Sorbonne University and Alessia Bauer, specialist for Scandinavian studies at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris.
Nordic Blue Humanities is a project which investigates the frameworks that can be applied to studying the current issue of climatic change from the perspective of a specifically Nordic environment. This project gathers scholars across disciplines, bringing the School of Humanities and the School of Sciences of the Sorbonne into conversation on the hybrid topic of aesthetic and scientific innovation in environments such as the seacoast, the ocean or atmosphere. It will provide the groundwork for a reflection on ecocriticism and ecofeminism that will be part of the critical process towards a Nordic theory of ‘Light Blue Humanities.’
