This page hosts the Coastal Studies / Coastal History Reading Group, a Covid-era Zoom creation that has been sharing ideas and texts since May 2021. We meet monthly via Zoom during the northern hemisphere’s Academic Year (September – May, usually), with some adjustments for time zones, especially when we bring in guests and interlocutors from the southern hemisphere.
If you’re interested in joining us, please email Anna Pilz (a.pilz@outlook.com) to be put on the list for the Zoom link.
We circulate our schedule before the start of each (northern hemisphere) semester – i.e., in August and again in January.
Here’s the schedule for the 2024-25 (northern hemisphere) academic year:
Mon Sept 16: Blue Humanities communities, with Sir Jonathan Bate (Blue Humanities Podcast) and Serpil Oppermann (Blue Humanities Book Series)
Mon Oct 21: Elsa Devienne, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (2024)
Mon Nov 18 Jon Anderson, Surfing Spaces (2024)
Mon Dec 16 Tamera Shefer, Vivienne Bozalek, and Nike Romano, eds,Hydrofeminist Thiinking with Oceans: Political and Scholaraly Possibilities (2024)
January Break
Mon Feb 17 Laura Watts, Energy at the End of the World; An Orkney Islands Saga (2018)
Mon March 17 Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008)
Early Summer Break 2025 – no meetings during April or May
We’ll have new events coming in September!
Here is the schedule from the 2023-24 (northern) academic year:
Mon Sept 25: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020)
Mon Oct 16: Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (U California P 2023)
Mon Nov 20: Steve Mentz, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023)
Mon Dec 18: Sritama Chatterjee, “Off-Shore Aesthetics and Waste in the Ship-Breaking Literature of Bangladesh” South Asian Review 44:2 (2023) pp 70-84
[January break]
Mon Feb 19: Ana Pilz, “Towards Coastal Romanticism,” Romanticism on the Net (forthcoming October 2023), introduction to Special Issue on “Scotland’s Coastal Romanticisms” & Claire Connolly’s “Watery Romanticism: Walking and Sailing West with Keats”
Mon March 18: Chris Wilhelm, From Swamp to Wetland: The Creation of Everglades National Park (U Georgia P, 2022)
Mon April 15: Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, Noah’s Arkive (U Minnesota P, 2023)
Mon May 20: Peter Wayne Moe, Touching This Leviathan (Oregon SU P, 2021)
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In reverse chronological order, here are the books we have discussed together since May 2021:
AY 2022-2023
May 2023: Killian Quigley, Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (Bloomsbury 2022)
April 2023: Jamin Wells, Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach (UNC Press, 2020)
March 2023: Alexandra Campbell and Michael Paye, eds. “World Literature and the Blue Humanities.” Special issue of Humanities (2020)
February 2023: Soren Frank, A Poetic History of the Oceans: Literature and Maritime Modernity (Brill, 2022)
2022
December 2022: Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (rev. ed. 1961)
November 2022: Stacy Alaimo, ed. “Science Studies and the Blue Humanities.” Cluster in Configurations (2019)
October 2022: Brian Russell Roberts, Borderwaters: The Archipelagic States of America (Duke UP, 2021)
September 2022: Margaret Cohen, The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy (Princeton UP 2022)
August 2022: Natalie Pearson, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck (U Hawai’i 2022), and Sara Rich, Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny. (Amsterdam UP 2021)
June 2022: Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (U Westminster P, 2021)
May 2022: Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (U Westminster P, 2021)
April 2022: Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (U Westminster P, 2021)
March 2022: Sara Rich, Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny. (Amsterdam UP 2021)
February 2022: Melody Jue, “Thinking with Saturation” in Saturation: An Elemental Politics, Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz, eds. (Duke UP 2021)
January 2022: Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistomology (Duke UP 2016)
2021
December 2021: Meg Samuelson, “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral” Comparative Literature (2017) 69 (1): 16–24
November 2021: Carola Hein, “Port City Porosity: Boundaries, Flows, and Territories,” Urban Planning 6.3 (2021).
October 2021: Margaret Cohen, gen. ed. A Cultural History of the Sea (6 vols) (Bloomsbury 2021) Volume editors: Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Antiquity); Elizabeth A. Lambourn (Medieval); Steve Mentz (Early Modern); Jonathan Lamb (Enlightenment); Margaret Cohen (Age of Empire); Fanziska Torma (Global Age)
September 2021: The Critical Surf Studies Reader, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman, eds (Duek UP 2017)
August 2021: Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran (1989)
August 2021: Nicholas Allen, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford UP 2020)
July 2021: Robert Ritchie, Lure of the Beach: A Global History (U California Press, 2021), and Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840 (American ed. U California 1994)
July 2021: Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2019).
July 2021: Joana Gaspar de Freitas, “Traditional Ecological Knowlede”
June 2021: Nicole Waller, “Connecting Atlantic and Pacific: Theorizing the Arctic,” Atlantic Srtudies 15 (2018) 256-78/
May 2021: Christopher Pastore, “Science of Shallow Waters” Isis 112.1 (March 2021).
May 2021: Coastal Meanings: Patricia Yeager, “Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons” PMLA 125.3 (May 2010) 523-45 and Michael Pearson, “Littoral HIstory.”