Asta Mønsted joins the Department of Scandinavian as Assistant Professor

August 19, 2024

Asta Mønsted joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Scandinavian(link is external). Born and raised in Uummannaq, North Greenland, her research focuses on the Greenlandic Inuit’s oral history and its potential to be evidenced in archaeological remains. She aims for the oral history to challenge instead of supplement the archaeological record in an effort to reconceptualize typical field methods. She has done field work in North, West and South Greenland, in addition to Denmark, Germany and Japan. She will develop the department’s interests in the Arctic region and is teaching a course on “Arctic Folklore and Mythology in Nordic Lands” this fall. Her research interests also include the High Arctic; Thule culture; Inuit drum; ethnohistory; cosmology; Inuit Whaling; and Qassi/men's house, to name a few. In June, she attended the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference in Bodø, Norway, where she presented her paper on “Preserving Indigenous Ecologies Through Greenlandic Inuit Oral History: Insights for Future Arctic Urban Environments?”, which aims to explain the ways Indigenous ecologies were safeguarded and transmitted through Greenlandic Inuit oral histories collected from 1735 to 1981. Mønsted earned her doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, where she wrote her thesis on “Animated reality: Inuit architecture and landscapes as seen through archaeology and oral history in Greenland.”