Throughout the polar world, aesthetics play a key role in legal environmental safeguards, but as our world and its climate rapidly change, the force of these provisions is quickly disappearing. Analyzing depictions of icebergs, this talk theorizes a new concept—the “melting sublime”— to help those wielding environmental law fight back against environmental threats at the poles.

Matthew Birkhold is an associate professor of German at the Ohio State University, where he also holds an appointment in the Moritz College of Law. His most recent book, Chasing Icebergs (Pegasus/Simon and Schuster, 2023) investigates the cultural, legal, and environmental hurdles we must clear to harvest icebergs as a large-scale freshwater resource. As a break from writing about climate change, Matthew newly completed a book on the history of the metronome, which will be published with Bloomsbury in 2025. Now, he is back to work on icebergs while a NOMIS fellow at the University of Basel.