Blue Humanities Initiative
At a time of extreme weather, melting icecaps, rising sea-levels, maritime pollution and oceanic biodiversity loss, Blue Humanities is one of the most exciting and important areas of emergent research in disciplines ranging from history to the visual arts to cultural and literary studies. The oceans cover 70% of the earth’s surface; for centuries they have carried the traffic of global exchange, for good and for ill; they begin and end the hydrologic cycle that shapes the climate of the planet; and they have inspired adventure and awe down the ages. From Homer to Winslow Homer, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to Melville’s Moby-Dick, they have shaped many of the greatest works of human imagination. And in a world of ecological fragility, all of us need to learn from the old ways of sailors, navigators and oceanic peoples such as the Polynesians for whom the sea is a home.
In collaboration with the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, which has recently become part of ASU’s Global Futures Laboratory, ASU’s Hawaii-based Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, and in partnership with researchers at King’s College, London, the Blue Humanities initiative will bring the expertise and passion of scholars in the College of Liberal Arts to our understanding of the relationship between humankind and the ocean, past, present and future.
Inititiative Director
Jonathan Bate is Foundation of Professor of Environmental Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Global Futures. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly Provost of Worcester College. A world-renowned Shakespeare scholar, he has also published award-winning biographies of three great English poets of the natural world: William Wordsworth, John Clare and Ted Hughes. His books Romantic Ecology and The Song of the Earth are widely regarded as pioneering and highly influential works of ecocriticism. In 2015, he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.