Guest speakers: Various

This conference brings together experts on history and philology from the Basque Country, Iceland, and the United States. It focuses on a little-known event in Basque history: the cold-blooded killing of 30 Basque whalers stranded in the north-west of Iceland after a shipwreck. The conference analyzes the antecedents to this new era of Basque whaling, the factors leading up to the massacre, as well as highlighting the legal and organizational aspects of whaling in the Basque Country, and the cultural sides of the contact between Basques and Icelanders in a remote part of a remote island during the 17th century. Sponsored by the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, Etxepare Basque Institute, IKER, and the IHC’s Geographies of Place series.