American/Medieval Goes North: Earth and Water in Transit is an engaging, innovative, and speculative volume of twelve new essays that stages a series of encounters with the North: with Vikings and polar bears, indigenous people and travelers, earth and water, monsters and witches, volcanoes and video games, gods and founding fathers. Like the first volume of American/Medieval it seeks to illuminate the connections between the apparently incompatible terms of its title, but it surpasses the first volume in the daring of its reach as its contributors think about the fragile environment of the arctic circle, climate change, indigeneity, and settler colonialism alongside of Icelandic volcanoes, water monsters, and medieval scribes. The volume brings art historians, filmmakers, poets, artists, and indigenous scholars together with historians, literary scholars and medievalists; they make films, play video games, write with quills, struggle with creating duologues in a medium designed for a single voice, and journey between places we only dream of connecting. Collectively they break new ground, giving us a more mobile and more nuanced Middle Ages, and a more expansive, creative, and interdisciplinary medieval studies.
Gillian R. Overing (PhD) is Professor of English and previously co-directed Medieval Studies at Wake Forest University.
Ulrike Wiethaus (PhD) holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions and the American Ethnic Studies Program at Wake Forest University.
