While Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein tells the story of a relationship between a scientist and his monster, it is a relationship that plays out in many different settings: the laboratory, the forest, the mountains, and the Arctic Regions. These places do not simply stage the scenes of Frankenstein but operate as part of the story itself. Connecting the ancient story of Prometheus to the world Shelley inhabited, the geography of Frankenstein tells the story of a troubled Europe at a time of profound change.

Michael Robinson is a professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (CT, USA). He studies exploration and its place within the cultural imagination. He is the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), winner of the 2008 Book Award for the History of Science in America, and The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). He has written for National Geographic, the Boston Globe, Common-Place, and Endeavour and served as an expert source for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and the Chronicle of Higher Education among others. He serves as the series editor for Polar Studies, University of Nebraska Press. He also hosts Time To Eat the Dogs, a podcast about science, history, and exploration.