This conference aims to reframe the North Atlantic as a region where the humanities can illuminate the entangled pasts and urgent futures of colonialism, by bringing together historians, literary scholars, cultural theorists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and researchers from neighbouring disciplines. In tracing how conflict and cooperation have shaped both historical settlements and contemporary claims to land, language, and identity, we seek to foster critical conversations on the decolonial responsibilities of scholarship – and on the transformative power of narrative, memory, and cultural expression in imagining more than just North Atlantic futures.

By situating medieval and early modern settlements within this continuum of conflict and co-operation, we invite interdisciplinary dialogue – among historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, and Indigenous knowledge holders – on how colonial encounters have never been one-sided impositions but negotiated spaces of contestation and coexistence.