Reading Arctic Futures

What does it mean to read the Arctic in an age of climate uncertainty? Through case studies of travelling, archiving, contested, and corrosive imaginaries in Western and Indigenous literature, Svenja Engelmann-Kewitz reveals how contemporary literature shapes our understanding of a rapidly changing region. Moving across geographies, media, scales, and genres, this study models an adaptive reading practice that challenges Eurocentric perspectives and engages with Indigenous ways of knowing. The result is a nuanced account of a complex region whose meanings are as dynamic and contested as its changing environment, offering readers new ways of understanding climate change, environmental imagination, and the politics of knowledge in the twenty-first century.

Svenja Engelmann-Kewitz is a postdoctoral researcher in American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She studied in Bochum and did her doctorate in American Studies at Technische Universität Dresden. Her research focuses on environmental and digital humanities with a special interest in how (alternative) futures are imagined in U.S. literature.