Dr. Colin Gioia Connors has been thinking a lot about trees — how we name them, how we call them, how we use them, and how we thank them. Disciplinarily he is a folklorist, which means that, while he has experience working with people from varied cultural traditions, his work is united by the humanistic endeavor of understanding how communities make meaning in a particular place. The words we use matter, and Colin is particularly interested in the words of place, that is, place-names. His dissertation, for example, applied features of sociotoponomastic theory (the “social life” of place-names) to a medieval Icelandic saga in order to argue that the saga’s place-names communicated to medieval audiences not only the real geography in which the saga was set, but also communicated normative or ‘correct’ attitudes towards that geography. Is a forest, for example, a place of mystery, of peace, or of economic opportunity? Currently, Colin is reconsidering Viking Age place-names that suggest that specific forests were understood as sacred. What might it mean for a forest to be sacred? What folk practices informed that attitude? Colin is excited to consider place as an integral part of our HUM 101 course on ‘Journeys.’ He is a lecturer and podcast producer in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, and he joins Humanities First as a Section Leader for Humanities 101 in Autumn Quarter, 2024.
