Collaboration with Ilmar Rootsi concluded

My collaboration with Estonian Ilmar Rootsi (which has been assisted by Nelly Mäekivi) has come to an end, since it today emerged we have a fundamental disagreement about a key source for our planned but now cancelled article on people killed by wolves historically in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia.

This means we will not co-write any article. However, I have offered assistance in making sure a translation is good quality if he wants to present more of his own work in English.

Cooperator for wolf article on man-eaters reshuffled once again

For quite some time now I have had an agreement with Estonian wolf researcher Ilmar Rootsi which involves co-writing an academic article on canid man-eaters in the next-to-modern history of Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. In mid-October 2011 Nelly Mäekivi got back into that project, replacing Silver Rattasepp yet again as the third co-writer. By now she's a doctoral student (as is he).

Talk on wolf agency in Turku held

Yesterday I presented my paper "Wolf history: Agents in hiding" here at the 6th conference of the European Society for Environmental History ("Encounters of Sea and Land" - Turku, Finland), where there are close to 300 participants and some 240 presentations. The presentation was the first of three in the session "Animal agency and history - three different approaches to Nordic wolves", initiated by Håkon Stokland and attended by around 15 people. I enjoyed both of the two other papers, by Heta Lähdesmäki and Karin Dirke.

Collaboration on wolf article uncertain

During my stay here, and in the days preceding it, I have not succeeded in making contact with my collaborator Silver Rattasepp, who is mediating in my scheduled collaboration with Estonian wolf ethologist Ilmar Rootsi, on the theme of man-eating wolves in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia the last 200 years or so. Last November we did not succeed in making contact with Rootsi, who was out of town at the time. As it stands, then, this whole collaboration is for the time being on uncertain ground (since I might only be back in Tartu in November, and we were supposed to have had a second meeting a long time ago, after agreeing to proceed with the project last September).