For the last few years, I’ve been working on a biography about the extraordinary life and times of a woman polar adventurer. The book brings to life the little-known story of a fearless scientific pioneer from Oxford who ventured into Siberia’s farthest reaches. But any hopes I may have had of retracing my heroine’s frozen footsteps in Siberia vanished when Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine.
Because I could not go to Siberia, I went to Paris instead. Thanks to the Paris-Oxford Partnership, I was able to continue writing my book while developing my Arctic research into the POLAR X PROJECT, a new collaborative interdisciplinary project with Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité).
The literature of polar exploration is often constrained, whether explicitly or not, by ideas of heroism, nationalism, whiteness and masculinity. The POLAR X PROJECT proposes to interrogate these notions and collaboratively develop a new framework for thinking about polar narratives in the Arctic and Antarctic. The project aims to generate an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to investigate the vexed relationship between the extraction of scientific, natural and ethnographically specific resources from the 19th century to the present day.
During my two-months in Paris in autumn 2024, I revised and wrote new chapters of my Siberian book using materials in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris; I wrote and submitted for peer review a new research article on women’s first-person accounts of Arctic expeditions; I presented this new research at a conference at Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès.
Once a week, Prof. Roudeau and I met to develop our collaboration on gender and polar extractivism through shared readings, brainstorming and discussion, sometimes with colleagues from other disciplines at Sciences Po, Angers, Vienna and Aberdeen.
We have planned the first international POLAR X workshop and symposium, to be held in Paris on 13-14 June 2025. Over 2 days in Paris and online, the workshop will provide an opportunity for established and emerging scholars to enter into conversation with one another over key texts, respond to works in progress, and reflect on what shifts in our conception of polar encounters might mean for our research and pedagogy. The workshop will provide an opportunity for scholars at all career stages across multiple intersecting and overlapping fields to broaden their professional networks and create connections enabling future collaborations.
My time in Paris was made all the more enjoyable because of the stimulating fellowship of international colleagues and students at the Institut d'études avancées de Paris, the Fondation Victor-Lyon and the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris.
The TORCH POP fellowship has been brilliant— it was wonderful to exist in French again (my mother tongue) and to make thought-provoking international research connections. Very many thanks to Sarah Clay, Christine Gerrard, Lorna Hutson, and Anbara Khalidi for their warm support and to TORCH for this extraordinary opportunity.
Michèle Mendelssohn is a Professor of English & American Literature, and a Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College.
