Photo credits:
Mikael Wallerstedt
Gísli Pálsson
Fellow, SCAS.
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Iceland.
Formerly Professor II, University of Oslo
Gísli Pálsson holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Manchester. He has been
Visiting Professor at King’s College London and the Universities of Stavanger, Cambridge,
California Berkeley, Miami, and Iowa. Pálsson was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He received the Rosenstiel Award in
Oceanographic Science from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science of
the University of Miami. His current work focuses on environmental issues within the frame-
work of environmental humanities. He has carried out fieldwork in Iceland, northern Canada,
the Cape Verde Islands, and the US Virgin Islands. Pálsson was the Vice-Chair of RESCUE
(Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth), a “Frontiers
of Science” initiative of the European Science Foundation and COST during 2009–2011.
Pálsson has published numerous articles in international, peer-reviewed journals. Among his
recent books are An Awkward Extinction: The Great Auk and the Loss of Species (2022),
The Human Age: How We Created the Anthropocene Era and Caused the Climate Crisis
(2020), Can Science Resolve the Nature/Nurture Debate? (with Margaret Lock, 2016),
Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (co-edited with Tim
Ingold, 2013), and The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan (2016).
The Man Who Stole Himself received the Vinson Sutlive Book Prize in Historical Anthropology
administered by the College of William & Mary, and was listed as one of the Times Literary
Supplement Books of the Year in 2017.
At SCAS, Pálsson will work on the historical origins and theoretical and practical significance
of “unnatural” extinctions (triggered by humans).
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23.