Cold Studies Lab

The Cold Studies Lab (CSL) is a transdisciplinary research initiative jointly hosted by the University of Rochester’s Humanities Center and the University of Turku (the John Morton Center for North American Studies and the Center for Environmental Humanities).

In a rapidly warming world, cold is increasingly a “hot” commodity, shaping global flows of resources and labor, and highlighting the need to understand its cultural, political, and ecological significance. CSL explores cold as both a concept and an environmental condition; studying cold as an idea, metaphor, as well as the lived reality of polar, Arctic, alpine, and winter worlds.

The lab investigates how cold, material and imagined, has shaped human knowledge, creativity, and survival, and how it informs social relations, identities, and ecologies within the more-than-human world. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and the arts, the lab studies phenomena ranging from glaciers, permafrost, and polar ecosystems to winter sports, tourism, and cities, as well as the technologies of freezing and preservation.

Cold, however, is not only a temperature or material condition; it is also a mode of perception and imagination that illuminates how humans understand fragility, persistence, and change. The lab therefore approaches cold as an aesthetic, ethical, and political category, one that frames experiences of isolation and intimacy, clarity and opacity, and transformation.

Through collaborative research, teaching, and public engagement, CSL fosters new perspectives on the cultural and environmental significance of cold and its emerging centrality in contemporary life.

Goals

Though its creatation, the CSL hopes to:

  1. Develop interdisciplinary approaches tocold as both a conceptual and environmental formation, exploring cultural, political, historical, esthetic, and ecological cold, including its material, metaphorical, and economic dimensions.
  2. Foster collaboration between the University of Rochester, the University of Turku, and international partners engaged in Arctic, polar, and cold-region research, as well as studies of environmental change.
  3. Advance public understanding of the cultural, political, and environmental significance of cold, as an experience, metaphor, condition, and increasingly contested resource, across past, present, and future contexts.
  4. Support research communication, knowledge exchange, and collaboration among lab members through regular meetings, workshops, teaching, shared projects, coordinated funding applications, and public engagement initiatives.

Cold Studies Faculty 

University of Rochester Cold Studies faculty include:

  • Tanya Bakhmetyeva, Associate Professor, Department of History (ice humanities, glaciers, environmental history, Russian/Soviet history, history of science)
  • Stewart Weaver,Franklin W. and Gladys I. Clark Professor of History, Department of History (ice humanities, glaciers, explorations, Antarctica, history of science, environmental history)
  • Brianna Theobald, Associate Professor, Department of History (history of Native America, women’s history, sports history)
  • Thomas Fleischman, Associate Professor, Department of History (environmental history, animal history/whales, Cold War, German History)
  • Nora Rubel, Elizabeth Denio Professor of Religion, Department of Religion and Classics (food studies)
  • Randy Stone, Professor, Political Science Department; Director, Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies

University of Turku Cold Studies faculty include:

  • Benita Heiskanen, Professor, John Morton Center; Professor of North American Studies (Transnational American Studies US history, society, politics, and culture race and ethnicity in the United States; US gun politics and culture: US popular culture and sport; Transdisciplinary research methods; ethnography, oral history, interviewing; space, place, and the body; the ethics of looking; politics of visual culture and race, class, and gender formations).
  • Silja Laine, Docent, History and Archaeology (urban, cultural marine studies, landscape studies, environmental studies)
  • Simo Laakkonen, Senior Research Fellow, Landscape Studies (Environmental history of the Baltic Sea, urban socio-environmental change, oral environmental history, ecology of war, history of winter)
  • Janne Korkka, University Lecturer, English, Classical Languages ​​and Multilingual Translation Communication (English-language Canadian fiction, ethics in fiction, and the study of space and animals in literature)
  • Kirsi Sonck-Rautio, PhD candidate, History and Archaeology (environmental ethnology and anthropology; political ecology; local ecological knowledge; cultural sustainability; transdisciplinarity; adaptation, resilience, and vulnerability studies; fisheries management, marine animal studies)
  • Pia Koivunen, University Lecture/Docent, History and Archaeology (Mission Finland. Cold war cultural diplomacy at the crossroads of East and West)
  • Jeffrey Wall, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS); Docent, Department of Geography and Geology; MSCA-TIES Fellow, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (ethno-ecology; environmental anthropology; Indigenous-led conservation)