“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” – Donald Trump, January 2025.

Is the Trump administration's ambition to acquire Greenland a radical break with international order, or a continuation of American strategic policy? Join three Australian experts in the history of colonialism and the conquests of the world’s icy places to discuss the US empire in historical perspective. In an era of melting ice caps and tense great power rivalry, this seminar dissects how the United States’ past shapes its present and future ambitions in the Arctic.

Kristie Patricia Flannery (convenor) is a senior research fellow at ACU who researches and writes about Spain’s global empire and colonialism in the Pacific.

Clare Corbould is Associate Professor in History at Deakin University, with expertise in the histories of Harlem, New York, slavery, racism and anti-racist activism in the United States and in Australia.

Alessandro Antonello is Associate Professor in Environmental History at the University of Tasmania. He studies environmental and international histories of Antarctica, the cryosphere, the world’s oceans, and other marine environments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Prudence Flowers is Senior Lecturer at Flinders University. Her research focuses upon political movements and public health in the United States.