This seminar convenes Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. Gulf South scholars to theorize the Gulf of Mexico as a transnational zone of ecological entanglement, rather than a set of discrete national environments. Although the Gulf’s waters, storms, labor histories, and extractive infrastructures circulate across borders, scholarship often remains siloed within national or linguistic frames. This seminar asks how environmental humanities approaches might illuminate the Gulf as a shared, relational ecology shaped by movement, sedimentation, and uneven histories of extraction.

Building on work on how narratives shape environmental governance, the seminar invites participants to examine how different cultural and disciplinary traditions narrate the Gulf’s multispecies relations, plantation systems, petro-histories, and climate futures. What becomes newly visible when Afro‑Cuban coastal storytelling, Mexican petro-literatures, and Gulf South grassroots environmental archives are placed in conversation? How might such comparative work unsettle methodological nationalism and foreground the region’s intertwined ecological and political realities? How do how local epistemologies—Afro-diasporic, Indigenous, coastal working-class—challenge dominant narratives of the Gulf? Papers may take several forms; comparative projects or site-specific papers are equally welcome, 

The seminar also welcomes reflections on multilingual scholarship; a related edited collection envisions side-by-side English and Spanish essays to model a hemispheric, justice-oriented approach to environmental humanities. Ultimately, this seminar aims to articulate a transnational framework for Gulf studies that centers ecological interdependence, historical accountability, and the lived realities of communities connected by shared waters rather than divided by borders.