Alexis Rider

Alexis Rider

Doctoral Candidate, History and Sociology of Science

PPEH Fellow 2017-2018

2017 - 2018

Alexis Rider is a doctoral candidate in the History and Sociology of Science. Her work focuses on the materiality of deep time in the Arctic, asking how scientific and artistic understandings come together when ice is used to peer far into the past, or to guard things long into the future. To do this, she examines the changing ‘optics of the Arctic’ in Western art and science from the nineteenth century to today: What was once conceived of a flat, one-dimensional space of distant exploration has transformed into a deep, temporally and physically dynamic region, essential to the geophysics of the globe. Originally from New Zealand, Alexis arrived in the US on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2011. After completing an MA at The New School for Social Research Alexis came to Penn, where her interest in environmental history, science and technology studies, and recent debates about our new epoch—the Anthropocene—led her to the frozen north. In October 2017, she is taking part expeditionary residency program, The Arctic Circle, where she will spend two weeks sailing the high north with artists and scientists on a 100-year-old barquentine tall ship.