Arctonauts tries to make sources about  polar exploration more accessible, by providing access to older published ones and slowly attempting to digitalize others. Currently focused on the Franklin Expedition and its crew, eventually we hope broaden our view to more of the 19th century.

Beside just publishing sources, Arctonauts has a blog attached to it where sources will be explained and other research will be published.

Right now, Arctonauts is ran solely by Wuyts, who started it as a passion project after seeing how polar explorations sources are both extremely scattered and low on the digitalization pole. 

Other Places

Twitter: @Arctonauts
Arctonauts email: contact@arctonauts.com

Authors, Editors, &c.

Wuyts

Wuyts is a Masters student in History at Ghent University, currently focusing their work on polar exploration and naval masculinities. They have appeared on Terror Camp, discussing the life of Charles Frederick Des Voeux, and AskHistorians 2021 Digital Conferences, on a panel discussing media depictions of history versus reality. They can occasionally be found having random thoughts about the queerification of historical figures and quoting weird passages from the narratives he’s reading on Twitter. When it comes to Arctonauts, they are the main dev and designer behind the site, as well as the transcriber and editor for most sources posted so far. If you want to contact them via email, you can!

Kathryn H. Stutz

Kathryn H. Stutz (email/twitter) is a doctoral student of classics at Johns Hopkins University whose research investigates the nineteenth century phenomenon of “polar classics,” that is, the influence of the ancient Mediterranean world upon more modern acts of imperial exploration at the edges of the earth, such as the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin. Kathryn has presented aspects of this research at several conferences, including presentations for digital academic events such as the video essay “Saints Who Never Existed: Relics of Franklin’s Lost Arctic Expedition & the Archaeology of a Queer Narrative,” developed as part of Indiana University’s 2021 Graduate Conference, How to Do Things with Worlds, and the filmed talk “Lady Franklin’s Legacy, or, the Fictional Afterlives of a Polar Explorer’s Widow,” composed for the AskHistorians 2021 Digital Conference, [Deleted] & Missing History: Reconstructing the Past, Confronting Distortions. Furthermore, Kathryn has published both reviews of polar historical fiction and also polar adaptations of ancient poetry, including a transformative translation of an ancient Greek poem by Sappho—blending the context of the ancient Mediterranean with aspects of Victorian Arctic exploration history—published in the translation journal Ancient Exchanges.

Alexa Price

Twitter. Blurb incoming!