Odin's Eye Blog

The 7th International Conference of the University of the Highlands Institute for Northern Studies (INS) took place at UHI Perth from April 15th to 17th and was praised by all attendees as a great success.

Organised by INS Lecturers, Dr Oisín Plumb and Dr Paul Malgrati, the conference attracted speakers and delegates from around the world to discuss the central theme, “Borne of a Carrying Stream: How Water has Shaped Heritage, Identity, and Power”. This was the first conference held at this location and attracted an amazingly diverse range of papers, showcasing truly interdisciplinary research and artistic output. In fact, the number of submissions was so high that two session rooms were needed to run concurrent panels, allowing for complementary papers to be grouped together. This arrangement proved very effective, with each presentation sparking lively discussions and questions.

Each day featured a keynote speaker who presented their research, tying together the day’s discussions into a cohesive narrative. The first day concluded with Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who discussed her research on “Living with the Sea: People and Waterscapes in the Viking Age,” addressing a large audience of delegates. The second day wrapped up with a seminar by the Scottish Makar, Professor Peter MacKay, titled “There Must Be More Subjects for Poems than These: Stones, Dead Birds, Language, the Seas.”

The complete two-day program is outlined below:

Wednesday 15^th April 2026

Session 1D. Portages and Sea Communication in the Norse world

• Alex Sanmark – Sea travel and the use of inland waterways in Norse Scotland
• Harley Nicole Botham – Islands, Rivers and Raiders: Viking Presence on the Guadalquivir
• Claire Stokes – The Solent Strait in the Viking Age

Session 1S. Water, Sustainability and the Anthropocene.

• Maureen Whalen – Impacts of Nature-based Arctic and Sub-Arctic Island Tourism (Shetland Islands, Faroe Islands, and Iceland)
• Chris J Spray and Thomas Spray – Where to for rivers, rewilding and restoration – from past histories to possible futures on Tweed
• Jack Dyce – “I’ll sing of a river I’m happy beside. The song that I sing is a song of the Clyde”. Personhood, exploitation, pollution and protection
• Siobhán Beatson – Harvesting the Tides: Traditional Marine Practices of the Early Modern Sea Loch Inhabitants

Session 2D. Water and Norse Place Names

• Abigail Lloyd – Structuring space and perceiving place: water, medieval settlement and identity
• Stefan Brink – The Maritime Aspect Regarding the Background to Early Scandinavian Polities

Session 2S. Water, Community and Identity

• Kelly Morrison – The Sea as Exile and Belonging: Women’s Stories of Scotland’s Coasts
• Linda Cracknell – Sea Marked: Throwing a Line to a Coastal Past.
• Sarah Squire – Keep it Convivial: Watershed as bioregional patch.
• Linda Johnson-Bell – Sacred Waters, Shared Worlds: Cosmology and Maritime Mobility in the North Atlantic

Session 3D.

• Rosie Bonté (Brepols) – Publishing for early career academics

Session 4D. Norse Community and Spirituality

• Em Horne – Water-based communities in the Íslendingasögur
• Tara Athanasiou – Forging ties at sea: negotiating non-kin social relations during Viking Age maritime migration
• Alicen Geddes – Earl Rognvaldr the sea-king: the spiritual dimension of Orkneyinga Saga

Session 3S. Cultural Archipelagos.

• Jane Trowell – From islomaniacs to archipelagians: indoing the moat-in-the-head
• Lesley McKay – Narrating Archipelagic Absence: Fiction as Historiographic Recovery in Late Medieval Unst
• Anna Souhami – ‘Stuck on a rock, out in the North Sea’: identity and power in remote island police work

Keynote: Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson

• Living with the Sea – people and waterscapes in the Viking Age Baltic

Thursday 16th April 2026

Session 5D. Early Medieval Celtic Seafaring in Reality and Memory

• Jane Logan – Shetland’s earliest Christians
• Rebecca Madlener – Gaelic place-name elements for ‘bay’ and Norse-Gaelic linguistic contact
• Freya Smith – Peril, Punishment and Salvation: the role of the sea in Sechrán Cléirech Choluim Chille

Session 4S. Fluvial Poetics and Imaginaries

• Danila Sokolov – The Fluvial Poetics of Early Modern Lyric
• Rebecca Drake – Medieval-Contemporary Hydropoetics at St Nicholas Fields
• Arianna Introna – A lambing ewe doesn’t care if there’s a drought or not’: Interspecies Grief in Rachelle Atalla’s Thirsty Animals
• Ullrich Kockel – The Mourning of Staburags and the Rise of the Latvian Nation: Ethnological Observations on the Banks of the Daugava River

Session 5S. Gaelic Riverbanks and Shorelines

• Carolyn McNamara – Shellfish, Shorelines, and Shared Identity: Linking Gàidhlig and Marine Biodiversity
• Mairéad Nic Craith – Sea Words and Coastal Expressions: An Ecological Exploration of Sea Tamogotchi
• Katherine Wren – Musicalising the power of water in a Highland Community

Session 6D. Fantastical Sea Creatures.

• Ronny Spaans – The transformation of the Troll Whale into the Kraken and Sea Serpent in the Early Modern Period
• Liv Helene Willumsen – The whale mentioned in witchcraft trials
• Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal – The Scientific Afterlife of the Norwegian Sea Serpent c. 1750–1880

Session 7D. Northern Scotland from the 18^th-20^th Centuries

• Rebecca Cornwell – What does botanical writing reveal about the ‘terraqueous’ island archipelago of Shetland?
• Leïla Cheurfa – The Debt of the Sea: Credit and Debt Practices Shaped by the Maritime Spaces of Northern Scotland in the Eighteenth Century
• Edward Graham – Threads across the water: How oceans, rivers and the fur trade connected northern Canada and northern Scotland during the age of the Hudson’s Bay Company
• Andrew Comley – The strange tale of George, a Monster and Duplex Tanks

Session 6S. Water, Folklore and Spirituality

• Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir – Selkie Metamorphoses and the Sea: Trauma, Exploitation, and Memory in C.J. Cooke’s A Haunting in the Arctic
• Madalaine Blyth: Sodden Cloth – The ritual relationship between textiles and water in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials
• Jane Austin – Liminal: A Directors Chat and Poetry Film Screening
• Ness Bosch – The Aquatic Sacred: An exploration of the spiritual ties between water and humanity, and the global crisis

Keynote: Professor Peter Mackay

• “feumaidh barrachd cuspairean a bhith ann airson dàin na clachan, eòin marbh, muir ’s cànan?” / “There must be more subjects for poems than these: stones, dead birds, language, the seas?”: water, poems and watery poems

The full list of abstracts can be viewed in the Conference Programme. The whole second day was brought to a close by an excellent Conference Dinner.

The third day of the conference was dedicated to a tour of Perthshire with Dr Oisín Plumb, who discussed the importance of Dunkeld Cathedral, the Scottish Crannog Centre, where delegates could experience hands-on experimental archaeology under instruction from the skilled staff and finally the hydroelectric development at Pitlochry. The full field conference field trip handbook can be downloaded here. 

Dr Oisín Plumb said, “It was an absolute pleasure to listen to such a diverse range of fascinating presentations. I was particularly struck by the quality of the discussion session at the end of each panel. It was wonderful to see how this allowed researchers from many different fields bring their knowledge together in new and interesting ways. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all of our delegates for a wonderful conference, and note the incredible contribution of our INS postgraduate researchers, whose assistance with everything from chairing panels to preparing coffee allowed the conference to proceed so smoothly.”

Thank you to all the delegates and speakers who travelled from around the world to join us. We appreciate Fiona Kennedy for her administrative support, PGR candidates for their help, Lynn Campbell for creating the conference bags and notebooks and UHI Perth for hosting the conference. We also extend our gratitude to the publishing houses and organisations that attended, including Rymour Books, Scottish Universities Press, Edinburgh University Press, Tippermuir Books, Brepols Publishing, the Scottish Society for Northern Studies, and Linda Cracknell.

Dr Paul Malgrati added, “In addition to a smooth order of ceremony — and a very tasty dinner — the conference achieved its main ambition, which was to showcase the breadth and range of INS’s cross-disciplinary identity. This was also reflected by the two keynote speeches: while belonging to different fields (Viking studies and modern Gaelic literature), Dr Charlotte Hendenstierna-Jonson and Prof Peter Makay trod surprisingly similar waters, stressing the influence of seas and archipelagos in shaping and dispersing the identities of seafarers. Such powerful parallels are the sort of things made possible in area studies and, overall, these testify to the conference’s roaring intellectual success”. 

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