Poets & migration 
Two Beck Lectures in October 

On Saturday, October 18, Dr. Ólöf Garðarsdóttir, Dean of the School of Humanities and professor of social history at the University of Iceland, will offer a lecture on “Icelandic emigration to the Americas, 1870–1914, seen from a Nordic comparative perspective.” This event will also take place at the University of Victoria’s Clearihue A207 at 2:00 p.m.

This presentation will look at the socio-demographic profile of Icelandic emigrants during the period 1873–1914. The group bears many similarities with emigrants from the other Nordic countries, in particular Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. During the early stages of the emigration process, family migration was a distinctive feature of Nordic emigration, whereas solitary migration became more common towards the end of the 19th century. As in the other Nordic countries, women were more likely to emigrate than in most other European countries, and in the case of Iceland, slightly more women than men emigrated to the Americas. In the presentation, we will also look at the differences in emigration patterns from rural and urban areas and argue that there were considerable differences between the settings.