Astrid E. J. Ogilvie

  • Senior Research Associate
  • Senior Scientist, Stefansson Arctic Institute, Iceland
  • ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Human ecology of Arctic and subarctic regions

Interface of social sciences, humanities, and the natural sciences; long-term human ecodynamics and climate change.

I study the human ecology of Arctic and Subarctic regions; the environmental, social, and human history of countries bordering the North Atlantic; studies of sustainability and adaptability in Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Canada; changing seasonality in the Arctic; historical climatology of northern Europe and reconstruction of sea ice incidence; syntheses of proxy climate records; North Atlantic fisheries history; the Viking Age; environmental humanities; medieval literature of Iceland; and the analysis of primary historical texts in the Nordic languages.

Positions

  • Professor Adjunct, Hunter College, CUNY, New York
  • Adjunct Professor, Royal Roads University, Canada
  • Associate Professor, Arctic Research Centre (CER-ARCTIC), Autonomous University of Barcelona
  • Visiting Professor, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland
  • Visiting Fellow, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Recent grant awards

Pending research applications

  • Interdisciplinary Approaches to Convergent Challenges in the Arctic (INTERARC) to Nordforsk. PI Astrid Ogilvie
  • P2C2: Reconstructing Abrupt Changes in Sea Ice Export toward the North Atlantic to NSF. PI Martin Miles
  • Understanding Resilience and Long-Term Ecosystem Change in the High Arctic: Narrative-Based Analyses from Svalbard (SVALUR) to the Belmont Forum. PI René Van der Wal
  • Impacts of Cimate Change on Ocean Systems and Society: Mitigation Pathways and Adaptation Options for Sustainability (OSMOSIS) to the Belmont Forum. PI Torben Koenigk
  • Environmental Syntheses of Local Knowledge and Historical and Literary Documents in the Greater Mývatn Area of Iceland ca. AD 1700 to the Present (MYDOC) to RANNÍS (The Icelandic Research Fund). PI Viðar Hreinsson.

Education

  • PhD: University of East Anglia, 1982

Awards

  • St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History, European Society for Environmental History, 2019
  • Fellow, Royal Meteorological Society, UK, 2013
  • Dorothy Martin Faculty Fellowship, University of Colorado Boulder, 2009

Courses taught

Outreach

  • 2017: Featured in the Nature Careers Feature "Hidden in the Past," on the use of historical data for climate reconstruction. Nature, 549: 419-421. doi 10.1038/nj7672-419
  • 2016 Polar Field story: Grass, environmental change, farming, and human ecodynamics.
  • 2013 interview on The Bat of Minerva, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota.
  • 2012 talk "A Brief History of Climate in Iceland," given at the 2012 Nansen conference "In Northern Mists: Understanding the Past, Predicting the Future—Icelandic and Norwegian Contributions to Arctic Research."
  • NORSAGA: Northern Narratives: Social and Geographical. Accounts from Norway, Iceland and Canada: PDF of a presentation on NSF-funded project.

Example publications

For additional publications, see Astrid's Google Scholar profile.

Astrid E. J. Ogilvie 2019: Famines, mortality, livestock deaths and scholarship: Environmental stress in Iceland ca. 1500-1700. In Kiss, A. and Prybil, K. (eds.), The Dance of Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Environmental Stress, Mortality and Social Response. London: Routledge, 9-24. DOI: 10.4324/9780429491085

Demaree, G. R., Astrid E. J. Ogilvie, Kusman, D. 2019: Historical records of earthquakes for Greenland and Labrador in Moravian Missionary journals. Journal of Seismology, 23(1): 123-133. DOI: 10.1007/s10950-018-9796-z

Hartman, S., Astrid E. J. Ogilvie, Ingimundarson, J. H., Dugmore, A. J., Hambrecht, G., McGovern, T. H. 2017: Medieval Iceland, Greenland, and the New Human Condition: A case study in integrated environmental humanities. Global and Planetary Change, 156: 123-139. DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.04.007

Martin W. Miles, Divine, D. V., Furevik, T., Jansen, E., Moros, M., Astrid E. J. Ogilvie 2014: A signal of persistent Atlantic multidecadal variability in Arctic sea ice. Geophysical Research Letters, 41(2): 463-469. DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058084

Nordli, O., Przybylak, R., Astrid E. J. Ogilvie, Isaksen, K. 2014: Long-term temperature trends and variability on Spitsbergen: The extended Svalbard Airport temperature series, 1898-2012. Polar Research, 33: 21349. DOI: 10.3402/polar.v33.21349