Oceans, or Aquatics, as Critical Method

Sheenjini Ghosh is a second-year PhD candidate in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span cinema, postcolonial theory, visual and sacred arts, South Asian narratives, and cultural memory, with additional focus on ocean literature, animal studies, and the Anthropocene. She is also the founding General Editor of SALIDmag, a SAS Initiative publication at UIUC.

Nesrine Chahine is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University. She specializes in modern Arabic literature in its global relations to European and non-Western cultural histories. Her book, Reading Egypt Globally, is under contract with Routledge, and her most recent article, "The Cold War Goes South," appeared in Interventions in 2025.

Trisha Federis Remetir is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.

Bangce Cheng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University. His research interests include Sinophone literature and culture, environmental humanities, urban studies, and affect studies. He previously completed his MPhil at the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong.

Sam Dennis Otieno is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and African Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His research examines East African auto/biographical practices, with particular attention to performance and photography. His work brings together theories of ruination, archive and repertoire, and oceanic epistemologies to explore how cultural texts and performances negotiate colonial afterlives and create new forms of relation.

Wael Salam is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Kuwait. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas. Previously, he taught at the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Texas at Austin, Kenyon College, and Middlebury College. He has published articles in prestigious journals, including Interventions, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, English Studies, Style, CEA Critic, Textual Practice, and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

Madeline Chanfrau is a current M.A. candidate in English at Wake Forest University who earned her B.A. from Davidson College. Her research interests include gender & sexuality studies, diaspora studies, and visual media. Sponsored by the Richter Memorial Fund, Madeline traveled in the summer of 2025 to Puerto Rico for the autoethnographic study of contemporary Diasporican literature. 

Sobande is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Brown University. Her work grounds itself in a black feminist theoretical tradition to comment on the role of race, gender, and memory in shaping the literature of the Atlantic world. Her research commitments include global black feminisms, critical black theory, and postcolonial theory, focusing on the key role the figure of the black woman plays in twentieth century literary and historical discourse. 

Pooja Shah is a PhD student in English at UMass Amherst. She is interested in the relationship between sense memory and iterations of carving as possibilities for engaging with Indian Ocean waters. 

Julia Bernier is an Associate Professor of History at Washington & Jefferson College. Her book, Freedom’s Currency: Slavery, Capitalism, and Self-Purchase in the United States was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2024. Her new project, All on Board: Slavery and Shipping on the Brig Orleans, has been supported by the Huntington Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Historic New Orleans Collection, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

Grace Monk is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, focusing on Greek and Latin American literature and culture of the 20th–21st centuries and phenomenology. Her dissertation looks specifically at shipwreck as it characterizes relationships to the past in literature of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. She is pursuing certificates at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Princeton.

Ashley J. May is a PhD student in Anthropology at Brown University. Her research emerges at the confluence of political anthropology, historical ethnography, and questions of land, the oceanic, and the temporalities of Black struggle. Ashley's methodological preoccupations attend to embodied, material, and visual archives as currents through which new forms of life flow in the wake of ongoing catastrophe.

Kristin Emanuel is a tribal member and registered artist of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She holds an MFA from the University of Kansas, and she is currently a PhD candidate researching visual poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her article about Hannah Weiner's performance poetry was recently published in Contemporary Literature 65.4. Her visual art and poems have appeared in Ecotone, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review.

Jeremy Chow is an associate professor of English and NEH Chair in the Humanities at Bucknell University. Chow is the editor of three essay anthologies and the author of The Queerness of Water. 

I am a photographer, and I am pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow. I hold a master’s degree in Contemporary Art from the University of Edinburgh. My doctoral research explores photography, literature, and memory writing. I presented the exhibition funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. I have collaborated with several art institutions. My forthcoming book chapter will appear in Exhibition Matters (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Neelofer Qadir is Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Georgia State University. She is a scholar of cultural studies with a focus on labor migration, histories of capitalism, and forms of racialization, working on her first book project, tentatively titled Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism in Indian Ocean Worlds. Her scholarship has been published in Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Mia Alafaireet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is at work on a book entitled Transplanting Blackness: New Negro Botanicals and the Ecology of Black Health. Her research on environmental health in the New Negro movement has been published in Modernism/modernity and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Her new work on  pneumatics of the Black garden is forthcoming in African American Review.

Dr. Prathna Lor is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English at Concordia University. Their critical and creative writing have appeared in Canadian Literature, Psychoanalysis & History, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, C Magazine, Jacket2, DIAGRAM, The Ex-Puritan, Working Fictions, among others. Currently, Lor is a member of the Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye Research Cluster with the dark opacities lab.

Qian Liu is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at The Ohio State University. He is currently completing two manuscripts, Urban Exergue: Black Spectrality and the Limits of Landscape, and Foundations of Displacement: Aquatic Media and the Ethics of Witnessing. In addition, he is also working on a co-edited volume, Italy's (Post)Colonial Ecologies: Elements, Power, and Resistance. His writings have appeared in California Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, Ecozon@, and other edited volumes.

Carissa Ma is an Assistant Professor of Anglophone Literature at Florida Atlantic University. Her research focuses on the politics of representation, affect, and emotion in speculative fiction, particularly Asian Futurisms. Her work aims to uncover new avenues of transformation by engaging with the past and envisioning alternative futures. Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Printing Culture, and Cultural Studies.

Christine Xiong is Ph.D. Candidate in English at Stanford University. Her dissertation, "Waterways: Oceanic Emplotments of Asian American Literature," charts the oceanic contours of Asian American and Asian diasporic literary form. Her writing appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment, Foundation, Performance Review, and more.

Soham Sinha is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Syracuse University. His research centers on 19th-century English literature, empire studies, and material culture. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism, his work investigates the literary and cultural dimensions of British imperial hydro-imagination in the 19th century, positioning ‘hydroterrestrial’ sites as critical spaces of imperial control and cultural production.