Oceanic Humanities
Virtual Session
Description
As traditional disciplines face questions of relevance and survival in an increasingly STEM-dominated academic landscape, Oceanic Humanities offers a new framework for understanding human experience, history, and the environment. By embracing the fluidity of water as a metaphor for shifting identities, the interconnectivity of global maritime routes as a model for cultural exchange, and the ocean as a space experienced primarily through technological mediation – whether via ships, scuba, or remotely operated vehicles – Oceanic Humanities necessitates interdisciplinarity. Crucially, this interdisciplinarity is not a surrender to STEM fields but a necessary collaboration: just as technology allows humans to access the ocean, humanistic inquiry provides the cultural, ethical, and historical frameworks that give meaning to these encounters. STEM needs the humanities as much as the humanities need STEM. At the same time, it revitalizes humanistic inquiry by offering new ways to study narrative, memory, and the cultural histories of peoples shaped by the sea. We invite papers that argue for the transformative potential of Oceanic Humanities in rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing 21st-century challenges, offering innovative perspectives on global issues like climate change, migration, and cultural memory. Papers may address the following topics and/or questions:
The role of Oceanic Humanities in addressing contemporary social and environmental crises;
Oceanic temporality (how water challenges linear, terrestrial conceptions of time);
Underwater media and the representation of submerged worlds;
The sea as a site of labor and resistance;
The ocean as a site of memory, both personal and collective;
The ecological implications of maritime extraction and resource exploitation;
Indigenous narratives and epistemologies of the sea;
The intersection of climate change, environmental collapse, and oceanic spaces in contemporary literary and cultural production;
How oceans shape the ways we narrate histories, construct identities, and imagine alternative futures.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
My career began sailing as able-bodied seaman in tankers, container ships, and offshore tugboats; I hold licenses as limited Mate and Master of motor vessels. Later, I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and received my MA and PhD from Cornell University in 2011. My early scholarship was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon graduate fellowship at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and research grants from the California State University. A chapter on technological and regulatory developments in the 20th century, “Practices: Robots and Memories” appeared in 2021 in A Cultural History of the Sea and another chapter, “No Masters: Towards A Craft of Radical Maritime Autonomy" is forthcoming in a volume from Prospero Editore. I’m currently Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at the California State University Maritime Academy where I teach literature, maritime history and oceanic humanities. I live in the Bay Area’s port city of Oakland, California.
Speaker Bio
Monica Ren is a PhD student in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She holds an MA in Cinema and Media Studies and a BA in Art History from the University of Chicago. Her research spans the history and theory of film, environmental media, postcolonial theory and archives, and STS. Her current project investigates the role of media in shaping technoscientific consciousness and ideological knowledge production of class and ethnicity in the transition from socialism to post-socialism.
Speaker Bio
Speaker Bio
Melissa Gniadek is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the MA Program in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Oceans at Home: Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Her essays have appeared in journals including American Literature, Early American Literature, J19, New Global Studies, and Lateral. Other publications include chapters in collections on American apocalypse and on decolonizing “Prehistory.”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sarah Senk, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at California State University Maritime Academy. Her research and teaching interests include trauma and cultural memory, speculative fiction and film, “slow disaster,” and commemoration in the digital age. Her work has appeared in The Canadian Review of American Studies, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Contemporaries, The American Prospect, Slate, and The Washington Post.
Speaker Bio
Nanthanoot Udomlamun (PhD) is an assistant professor in comparative at the Department of Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University. Her extensive body of work encompasses research articles exploring themes such as diaspora, migration, and critical analyses of colonialism, neoliberalism, and global capitalism. Her research interests lie in postcolonial theory, decoloniality, and environmental humanities. Her recent conference papers include “Unraveling More-than-human Entanglements and Rethinking Planetary Resilience: A Material Ecocritical Reading of Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors” and “Planetary Multiplicities and Planetary Memory in The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy”.
Speaker Bio
Shelby E. Oxenford, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on postwar and contemporary Japanese, Korean, and comparative East Asian literature, film, and media, through the lenses of memory/trauma studies and the environmental humanities.