Emma Gilheany is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at St. Olaf College. She is an environmental anthropologist who uses sociocultural, archaeological, archival and multi-media methodologies to examine life in the circumpolar north. In particular, her research foregrounds Inuit self-determination at the intersection of Cold War militarization and climate change. She is interested in collaborative and community-based methodologies, and has been working in Hopedale, Nunatsiavut since 2017. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Environmental Humanities, Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and Canadian Journal of Archaeology. Read her scholarship here.

Prior to St. Olaf, she was a William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program at Harvard University and a Research Affiliate of the Harvard University Native American Program. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where she won the Sol Tax Dissertation Prize for "combining highest intellectual merit with relevance to anthropology and action." She has taught or mentored students at Harvard, UChicago, Montclair State University, and Raritan Valley Community College.