Vicki Szabo

Associate Professor, Darth Vader Chair of Ancient and Medieval History Western Carolina University

  • Cullowhee NC

Vicki Szabo's research focuses on medieval environmental history, the medieval North Atlantic and the history of whaling.

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Biography

Dr. Vicki Szabo received her PhD in Medieval Studies at Cornell University and currently serves as an Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on medieval environmental history, the medieval North Atlantic, and the history of whaling, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She currently runs a major international research project focusing on the molecular, textual, and archaeological evidence for whale use in the medieval North Atlantic. She is author of Monstrous Fishes and the Mead Dark Sea (Brill, 2008), several articles and book chapters on medieval environmental history, and is currently working on a textbook on medieval wildlife. The Force is strong in her.

Industry Expertise

Research
Education/Learning
Writing and Editing

Areas of Expertise

Medieval History
Viking Age
Environmental History
Medieval North Atlantic World
Ancient History

Education

Cornell University

Ph.D.

Medieval Studies

2000

Cornell University

M.A.

Kalamazoo College

B.A.

Languages

  • English

Media Appearances

WCU Professor Working On Endangered Whales Documentary

The Transylvania Times  online

2022-01-28

When Vicki Szabo, associate professor of history, finished her 2008 book on medieval whaling, she quipped in the acknowledgements she would remember all her Western Carolina University colleagues when it was made into a feature film.

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Faculty Senate approves resolution opposing resumption of in-person instruction for fall 2020

WCU Stories  online

2020-08-11

Faculty Assembly representative Vicki Szabo, associate professor of history, shared some of her concerns about the resumption of classes for fall semester. “I’m sitting in the McKee Building right now and I have my mask around my neck, but as I walked in today, we don’t yet have the controls that a grocery store does. We don’t have proper ingress and egress. We don’t yet have cleaning supplies in the classroom. Each faculty member was supplied with 75 wipes. That’s not going to last long,” Szabo said.

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Archaeologists Unearth Hollowed-Out Whale Vertebra Containing Human Jawbone, Remains of Newborn Lambs

Smithsonian Magazine  online

2019-11-08

Per the press release, the team—made up of Carruthers, Western Carolina University’s Vicki Szabo, St. Mary’s University’s Brenna Frasier and UHI’s Ingrid Mainland—analyzed the fin whale bone as part of a larger project exploring the use of whale bones in the western Atlantic over the last 1,000 years. Earlier this year, the researchers tested relevant finds from both the Cairns and Mine Howe, a separate archaeological site on Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

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Articles

Genetic examination of historical North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) bone specimens

Marine Mammal Science

2022

Species monitoring and conservation is increasingly challenging under current climate change scenarios. For the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) this challenge is heightened by the added effects of complicated and uncertain past species demography.

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Archaeological sites as Distributed Long-term Observing Networks of the Past (DONOP)

Quaternary International

2020

Archaeological records provide a unique source of direct data on long-term human-environment interactions and samples of ecosystems affected by differing degrees of human impact.

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A Lockpick's guide to dataARC: Designing infrastructures and building communities to enable transdisciplinary research

Internet Archaeology

2021

The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) community initiated dataARC to develop digital research infrastructures to support their work on long-term human-ecodynamics in the North Atlantic.

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