As a student in a summer archaeology course at the University of Cambridge in England, Julie Brown’s attention was drawn to similarities she noted across cultures in the practice of burial at sea.

“We were looking at this tiny, tiny little ring,” recalled Brown, an English instructor at Clatsop Community College. “I noticed something about the ring, that it had a boat with a priestess on it.”

Curiosity grew from that encounter and led to further reading in periodicals, books and journals. She began researching the ceremonial role of boats, such as in Chinook canoe burials and Viking ship graves. “I just started thinking about the connection between boats and death,” Brown said.

Certain details stuck with her. “I found out that in the Philippines, they always point the boats toward the Milky Way,” she said.

Brown will discuss that research at 7 p.m. on Thursday as part of the Ales & Ideas lecture series, a partnership between the college and Fort George Brewery at the Lovell Showroom. The presentation takes its name from Norse mythology, titled “Sailing to Valhalla: Ship Burials and Boat Graves from Around the World.”

Artifacts and stories related to maritime culture have long fascinated Brown. As a Fulbright visiting scholar in 2018, she taught on the subject at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Dornoch, Scotland, drawing connections between the maritime history of Scotland and Astoria.

At the college, Brown teaches a humanities course on maritime culture, focused on history, clothing, rituals, music and art. Her students have had the chance to climb aboard vessels like the Columbia River Bar Pilots’ boat Peacock, where they gained firsthand experience before turning in songs and poems.

“The students learned how to work up in the rigging and how to navigate,” she said. “They have their own story to bring back.”

A fifth-generation Oregonian who grew up in Portland, Brown’s interest has grown out of living in Astoria. Many of her students work on boats, she said, and out her classroom window are ships passing by. “It seems like such a natural thing to explore,” she said.

That exploration is tangible, too. At the suggestion of a student, she trained and then worked for two years as a deckhand on the tall ships Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain, an experience she described as “the best thing I’ve ever done in my life, and the bravest.”

Brown is also one of the co-founders of the annual FisherPoets Gathering. She remembered a call from Jon Broderick, another co-founder, that led to the first reading in Astoria.

She plans to end her lecture by reading from “A Viking’s Funeral,” a poem by Geno Leech, a FisherPoet from Chinook, Washington. Similar themes emerged from the piece and her research into Scandinavian traditions. The poem tells the story of a local fisherman who left a note before deciding to die at sea with his boat.