Try this: picture a polar adventurer.
Chances are, you’ll imagine a frostbitten man battling a snowstorm, a ship trapped in ice, or a character from the TV horror drama The Terror. Names like Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Robert Peary and Fridtjof Nansen may come to mind.
Now try this: picture a woman polar adventurer.
What comes to mind? If you’ve suddenly drawn a blank, that’s worth thinking about.
Putting Women’s Polar Stories in Perspective
The literature of polar exploration is often constrained, whether explicitly or not, by ideas of heroism, nationalism, whiteness and masculinity. Led by Michèle Mendelssohn (Oxford University) and Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité), 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.
Women have been writing about polar regions for a very long time. They have lived in the Arctic for millennia. In the nineteenth century, Inuit women cartographers like Iligliuk guided English Royal Navy officers searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. Some Indigenous Arctic communities were matriarchies, as Speaker of the Saami Parliament of the Kola Peninsula Valentina Sovkina notes.
Women have been visiting and writing about the Antarctic since the nineteenth century. They have left their mark in place names like Bahia Eva Perón (later renamed Mobil Oil Bay).
What is POLAR X?
POLAR X aims to generate an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to investigate the vexed relationship between gender, place and the extraction of scientific, natural and ethnographically specific resources from the 19th century to the present day. We aim to achieve this through the intersecting lenses of literature, politics, gender and indigeneity, history of science, environmental history, art history and visual studies. We hope to open the discussion more broadly to geographers, anthropologists, climatologists, and polar studies specialists.
First POLAR X Conference
The first POLAR X conference was held in Paris on June 13 - 14 2025. During two sweltering hot days, researchers and creatives from across the world joined online and in person for a rich and thought-provoking workshop and symposium.
Established and emerging scholars discussed key texts, responded to works in progress, shared methodologies and reflected on what shifts in our conception of polar encounters might mean for research and pedagogy.
We discussed generically-rich polar works and research across the centuries including:
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Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein,
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Iñupiaq Ada Blackjack’s 1923 diary about her solo survival on Wrangel Island,
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Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 short story about a woman-led expedition, “Sur”,
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Oxford Professor of Ocean and Climate Science Helen Johnson’s blog whilst at sea in 2007
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Iñupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik’s 2012 American Book Award-winning poetry collection, Corpse Whale,
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Sarah Airriess’s 2022 graphic novel, The Worst Journey in the World (adapted from the 1922 Apsley Cherry-Garrard classic), among many more.
New York Times bestselling author and journalist Julia Flynn Siler reported on the conference.
POLAR X’s first stage was made possible by partnerships between TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Université Paris Cité's LARCA lab, CNRS, and l’Institut d’études avancées de Paris.
What’s Next?
We’re excited to carry this momentum forward and to build the next stage. In the coming months, we’re establishing an interdisciplinary steering committee. It will help guide the project’s future direction.
We look forward to continuing this work together with the curiosity, generosity, and collaboration that marked the first POLAR X event.
— Michèle Mendelssohn
Michèle Mendelssohn is Professor of English & American Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford.
