Blue Humanities

What are the Blue Humanities and who invented the term?

March 27, 2024 Jonathan Bate Season 1 Episode 1
What are the Blue Humanities and who invented the term?
Blue Humanities
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Blue Humanities
What are the Blue Humanities and who invented the term?
Mar 27, 2024 Season 1 Episode 1
Jonathan Bate

From Homer's Odyssey to Shakespeare's tempestuous late plays to Melville's Moby Dick to recent writings by authors immersed in the Indian and Pacific oceans, literature has again and again gone down to the sea, to - in the words of poet John Masefield - "the lonely sea and the sky." But what can this vast body of watery wisdom teach us in times of environmental crisis and fragile oceanic ecosystems? That's the question asked by the emerging field of Blue Humanities. In the inaugural episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities Sir Jonathan Bate goes to the Connecticut shoreline and interviews Professor Steve Mentz of St John's University, New York, who is often credited as the inventor of the term. 

You can follow Jonathan on Twitter/X here and the Humanities Institute here.
For more on ASU's Blue Humanities Initiative, follow this link.
New episodes featuring leading scholars will be uploaded regularly.
This episode was edited by Dave Waugh at Scrubcast.
Music: from Claude Debussy, La Mer (rights-free recording).

Show Notes

From Homer's Odyssey to Shakespeare's tempestuous late plays to Melville's Moby Dick to recent writings by authors immersed in the Indian and Pacific oceans, literature has again and again gone down to the sea, to - in the words of poet John Masefield - "the lonely sea and the sky." But what can this vast body of watery wisdom teach us in times of environmental crisis and fragile oceanic ecosystems? That's the question asked by the emerging field of Blue Humanities. In the inaugural episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities Sir Jonathan Bate goes to the Connecticut shoreline and interviews Professor Steve Mentz of St John's University, New York, who is often credited as the inventor of the term. 

You can follow Jonathan on Twitter/X here and the Humanities Institute here.
For more on ASU's Blue Humanities Initiative, follow this link.
New episodes featuring leading scholars will be uploaded regularly.
This episode was edited by Dave Waugh at Scrubcast.
Music: from Claude Debussy, La Mer (rights-free recording).