Current Research

My current book project, Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms, charts an alternative history of sea literature that continues to this day. It explores a literary corpus of twentieth century and contemporary works in English, Spanish, and Portuguese in which the shapeshifting figures of the Atlantic rim—among them diasporic sea deities, seal-human selkies, and sea-creaturely mariners—embody marginalized ways of knowing and experiencing the ocean. In revaluing the maritime epistemologies represented by these ambiguously gendered, ambiguously human figures, Atlantic Shapeshifters offers a rejoinder to a dominant, Eurocentric tradition of sea literature which treats the ocean simply as setting or metaphor and accords maritime competence almost exclusively to men on ships. Sea literature, the project argues, is a living, actively decolonizing genre that reflects the diversity of maritime experiences that have produced it. Drawing upon history, marine science, law, and my own experience at sea, the project explores the historical and contemporary entanglements of humans and marine environments and ecosystems. Ultimately, Atlantic Shapeshifters shows that sea literature, which attends to these entanglements, can help us imagine just, multispecies futures on our climate-changed ocean planet.