Mount Saint Mary College professors Jen Bready and Michael Fox stand beneath the Northern Lights during a winter break trip to Iceland.
For Mount Saint Mary College professors Jen Bready and Michael Fox, a trip to Iceland over the winter break was an unforgettable journey into one of the world’s most dramatic landscapes, full of glaciers, glistening snow, and the chance to witness the Northern Lights dancing across the Arctic sky.
Much of the professors’ journey was defined by the sheer scale of the environment. From standing at the Bridge Between Continents, where the North American and Eurasian plates slowly pull apart and one can touch both at the same time, to descending into the silent, frozen depths of volcanic caves, the experience was one of exploration and adventure.
You might not normally think of caves as “beautiful,” but then again, most of them in America aren’t radiant corridors of ancient permafrost: “The ice above you is three meters thick,” explained Bready, Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Education and a professor of Mathematics. “It was really interesting because you’re walking on dirt and above you it almost looks like glass…the highlight is when they turn off all the lights at one point so you’re in complete darkness. And that’s just something that you don’t ever get to experience: complete darkness.”
For Fox, Acting Dean, Chairperson, and Associate Professor of Business Law at the Mount’s School of Business, the Thingvellir National Park provided a tangible connection to the history of law, by way of the 900-year-old Viking sagas.
“It’s where the Icelandic parliament first met in 930,” he said, “sort of like the modern parliamentary systems since ancient Greece. You think of [the Vikings] as lawless, but they were organized; they had law, they had parliament.”
Bready and Fox also marveled at Iceland’s rich culture and tradition, from the preservation of the Icelandic language to unique folklore like the Christmas Cat, or Jólakötturinn. Lurking in the shadows on Christmas Eve, this giant, man-eating feline preys on those who haven’t received new clothes to wear for the festivities. (Hearing a tale like that might just make one appreciate Jolly Old Saint Nick leaving a little coal in their stocking.)
But as any educator will tell you, it’s difficult to remain off-duty for long. As they trekked across tectonic plates and navigated the stark beauty of the Land of Fire and Ice, the pair stumbled upon lessons that were too good to leave behind.
Fox’s inspiration came in the form of a humble can of Coke Zero. As a seasoned traveler who has seen all seven continents, all five oceans, and nearly every state in America, Fox is well-trained in finding wonder in the ordinary.
“I take pictures wherever I am of those cans and I use them in my law course when we talk about intellectual property, like copyright, trademark, and licensing,” he explained. “Because they do bottling agreements, [Coke products] don’t have to made in Atlanta, Georgia. They license it out and then they make it on site.”
And don’t worry, Coke Zero connoisseurs: the Icelandic variant tastes pretty much the same as our homegrown version, said the professors.
For Professor Bready, her academic inspiration was found in the rhythm of the sun. The extreme variance in daylight, a hallmark of life near the Arctic Circle, offered a perfect dataset for her future pre-calculus students to analyze back at the Mount.
“I’ve done activities with trig functions with sunrise, sunset,” she explained. “What's fascinating is if you go to your weather channel app, normally sunrise and sunset [is an arc]. For Iceland, it’s just [flat]. Looking at it off the horizon at 1 p.m., it’s where it would be for us at 4 p.m. It's never above your head; it's always low on the horizon.”
As the Spring 2026 semester begins, these Icelandic experiences are moving from travel logs into lesson plans. For Bready and Fox, the journey served as a reminder that for a dedicated educator, the world is always a classroom, dented cola cans and all.