Blue Humanities

Keywords in Blue Humanities

Keywords in Blue Humanities are symposiums held that define and discuss the culture of water.

Watch leading scholars address and expand on one "keyword" in this important, rapidly emerging field -- laying a conceptual groundwork for students and colleagues. 

Keywords covered in the series

Søren Frank (Copenhagen University) distinguishes between "historical" and "deep" (or geological) time. Noting how oceans archive temporal change, and how climate change has resulted in planetary change many times, Frank explains how literature helps us imagine this scale. His analysis closes with a discussion of Danish author and Nobel laureate Johannes V. Jensen's novel, The Glacier (1908).

Malcolm Sen (University of Massachusetts) explores the term sediment -- connecting geologic and historic interpretations. After discussing geology as a scholarly discipline, Sen closes with an analysis of Juliana Spahr's poem about the Deepwater Horizon spill, "Dynamic Positioning."

Historian Melissa L. Cooper (Rutgers University) explains how islands are imagined. Using the example of Sapelo Island, she illustrates the ways in which Black along Gullah-Geechee coastal sea islands have been imagined as isolates, being timelessly removed. Cooper emphasizes, in closing, how reclaiming one's own narrative remains central to Black cultural survival.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs delivers her Keyword in Blue Humanities, school. Drawing from examples of striped and right whale dolphins, discussed in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Gumbs presents marine mammals as models for education and care.

University of Florida Professor Sid Dobrin talks fish - providing a global perspective on protein extraction.

Sayantika Chakraborty, also from the University of Florida, discusses migration - framing  ecology and infrastructure development against Indigenous mobility through the graphic narrative "Water," by Subhash Vyam.

Steve Mentz from St. John's University reflects upon buoyancy - fusing personal anecdote and a short reading of "The Castaway" chapter of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Abigail Chabitnoy situates Alutiiq poetry alongside her keyword, shoreline, reading from her own work and that of Joan Naviyuk Kane.