Dr. Irene Garcia Losquino

What are some career highlights or milestones that you are particularly proud of?

- Recently, I was curator of the exhibition A Viking Life, in the state-of the-art Gaiás Centre Museum in Galicia.

- I was awarded a Bernadotte research scholarship at the Onomastics Department, University of Uppsala.

- I directed the first Viking Studies seminar in Spain.

What is the main focus of your current research, and why is it important?

After years of investigating viking contact in the Iberian Peninsula, mostly with Galicia but also al-Andalus, I am now centred on the question of settlement. This implies a large change in general perceptions of what type of contact took place in Iberia, traditionally understood as having been subjected only to raiding activities. Vikings did settle in Iberia, though not in large numbers, and the sociopolitical motivations behind each instance of settlement are different and complex, as are the relationships between settled groups and local inhabitants.

What specific projects or research activities will you be working on during these three months?

During my time with WIVA, I will be working on some aspects of viking migration, especially paying attention to a group of Norse settlements in northwest Iberia.

What do you hope to achieve or contribute during your time with us?

Conversation and ideas exchange with WIVA staff and visiting scholars will enrichen the research done while I'm at WIVA and thereafter. I would like the daily informal interactions and the different seminar and community days organised by WIVA to influence my work and help evolve my ideas. Equally, I hope to contribute with my specific knowledge on Iberia and my methodological experience to group discussions. I think it likely that all these new exchanges will lead to future collaborations.

How do you see your work aligning with or complementing our Centre's goals or mission?

I have admired the Centre's mission since its conception, as it so firmly aligns with my own views on Viking-Age research and the promotion of healthy academic environments. The Centre's emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinarity is as appealing to me as their spotlight on diversity. The latter is fundamental for analysing the Viking Age as a time of complex multicultural interchange, emphasising the myriad ways in which vikings interacted with the many peoples of the northern hemisphere. As a researcher used to working on the southern diaspora, something uncommon in existing academic circles, the Centre's focus on the south and the east is a welcome embrace to geographical areas of research that have for too long not been central to Viking Studies.

What excites you most about collaborating with our team and being part of our Centre?

The value they place on the diversity of approaches, the opportunities for debate about new and under-researched issues, the contact with scholars from around the world with compatible or completely new perspectives, the learning from staff and visiting researchers, the exciting possibilities for collaboration.

What impact do you hope your research will have, either in the academic community or beyond?

New knowledge on migration to the southern diaspora will bring this geographical area into generalised debates of the Viking Age and will contribute to understanding Norse migration elsewhere. It will also help paint a complex, nuanced picture of the level of multicultural interaction and cohabitation in the Viking Age.