Job description

Silje Gaupseth is an Associate Professor of Polar Cultural Studies and Director of the Polar Museum at UiT The Arctic University of Norway’s Arctic University Museum.

In recent years, she has combined acadmeic research with curatorial work at the Polar Museum in Tromsø. This has resulted in several exhibitions, most recently Queering Polar History (2022), which explores the queer dimensions of a polar museum collection. Previous exhibition projects include Looking to the North: Maps of the northern areas from the beginning of the art of printing to the Barents expedition (2021); Katja Aglert’s video work Antifreeze: Rehearsals as Score (2017–18); Living Ice / the freezer version (2018); and the permanent exhibition Wanny and Henry: Hunting and Trapping in the Arctic (2019), about gendered representations of the history of Norwegian overwintering hunting.

Gaupseth’s research focuses on polar cultural history, queer history and museology, with particular emphasis on the role of museum materialities in museum knowledge production. In her PhD research, she explored self-representation in exploration literature (Gaupseth 2017), and in later work she has approached polar cultural history through Indigenous methodology, as well as museological and queer-theoretical perspectives. Together with Marit Anne Hauan, she is the co-editor of the recent anthology Kjønn i isen: Fragmenter til ei ny polarhistorie [Gender on Ice: Fragments towards a New Polar History] (2024).

Gaupseth is currently head of the research group XARC at the Arctic University Museum (UiT), and a member of Arctic Voices (UiT) and Arctic Museum Ecologies (UiO). Past research project affiliations include QUEERDOM Ordinary lives and marginal intimacies in rural regions. Contrasting cultural histories of queer domesticities in Norway, ca 1842-1972 (University of Bergen, 2021-2026), Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (UiT, 2020–2024), and Arctic Discourses (2006-2009), all funded by the Norwegian Research Council.