Matthew Birkhold is an associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and founding director of the Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies and Environmental Humanities. His research and teaching explore the ways in which law and culture are intertwined, particularly in German-speaking Europe, the Arctic, and Indigenous North America. His first book, Characters before Copyright (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the ownership of fictional characters before the invention of copyright. His second book, Chasing Icebergs (Pegasus/Simon and Schuster, 2021) investigates the ownership of icebergs, identifying the environmental, legal, and cultural hurdles to equitably sharing the freshwater resource. Birkhold’s next project focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of environmental law in the melting Arctic.