Blue Humanities

With sail came trade—and with trade came connection between cultures. When did that begin in the West? In this episode we go to ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, and the islands of the Mediterranean; we learn about the Phoenicians (who didn’t call themselves Phoenicians); we set sail with Odysseus; and Carthage meets Rome. Josephine Quinn, the first woman to hold the distinguished Professorship of Ancient History at Cambridge University, joins host Jonathan Bate to talk about the maritime dimensions of her bestselling book How the World made the West: A Four Thousand Year History.

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).

In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast, we turn from the oceans to the rivers that feed the sea. Host Jonathan Bate joins Britain’s leading writer of the natural world, Robert Macfarlane, to discuss his new book Is a River Alive? Their discussion ranges from the “Rights of Nature” movement to Macfarlane’s breathtaking journeys along great rivers in Ecuador, India and Canada, where he immerses himself in wonders and meets activists who are striving to save the rivers that are the arteries of life on earth. 

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).

When, why and in what ways did modern historians turn their attention to oceanic encounters and crossings? In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast, presenter Jonathan Bate talks to David Armitage, Lloyd Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, about the Atlantic and Pacific turns in historiography. Professor Armitage has written, edited and contributed to many books in the field, including The British Atlantic World (2002, 2009), Essays in Atlantic History (2004), Pacific Histories (2014) and, most recently, Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025). Their discussion ranges from the extinction of the Steller’s sea cow to a floating operatic stage featured in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace. 

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).

How do we imagine the ocean bed? Who owns the sea floor? What does our obsession with shipwrecks such as the Titanic tell us about ourselves? What is the history of the deepwater extractive economy? And its future? In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast, Jonathan Bate talks to Lisa Han, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College about her new book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (University of Minnesota Press), in which we learn how media of various kinds - photography, sonar, mapping - have shaped our understanding of the depths of the oceans.

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).

“There are some who are oceanic in effect,” pronounced Victor Hugo with regard to Shakespeare. “As for the sea, it thunders in passage after Shakespearian passage, and is indeed Shakespeare’s main poetic symbol, its roughness especially being used over and over again to impress on us a sense of man’s turbulent existence,” wrote the critic G. Wilson Knight. In the first of a series of five new Blue Humanities podcasts, Jonathan Bate talks to Professor Peter Womack about his new book Shakespeare, The Sea and the Stage (Edinburgh University Press), a lively study that places Shakespeare in the context of his own maritime moment, but also shows how his language of sea and ocean roars through the ages.

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).

In a world of torrential storms and rising sea levels, what can we learn from the ancient and enduring story of Noah's ark? In this episode, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates talk about their wittily-titled book Noah's Arkive. Animals going in two by two (or in some cases fourteen by fourteen), the raven, the dove, the rainbow, the curse upon Ham, above all the ark itself as a place of shelter and safety for some, but exclusion and exposure for others: these are ideas and images that have resonated and been reinterpreted down the ages, with many notable reconfigurations in contemporary speculative fiction, where a spaceship -- or even spaceship earth -- is another ark. Come aboard, but also think about those who are left marooned outside ...

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).

In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University,  presenter Jonathan Bate is in conversation with CHamoru poet, critic, environmentalist and activist Craig Santos Perez (X: @craigsperez). They talk about the history of his native island of Guam in the Pacific -- from Spanish colonial outpost to American military base and tourist destination. Listen for an array of fascinating, often tragic stories: how indigenous language was extirpated; how a snake entered Paradise and destroyed the native ecology, rendering the beautiful Micronesian Kingfisher extinct in the wild; and how SPAM (the processed meat, not the junk email) crossed the Pacific. Craig discusses his multi-volume poetry sequence from unincorporated territory, his ecopoetic collection Habitat Threshold and his navigation of a new critical seascape. Along the way, he reads his powerful poem "ars pasifika" -- and Jonathan introduces a comparison between Guam and the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.

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).

In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University,  presenter Jonathan Bate is in conversation with maritime voyager, historian and literary scholar Richard J. King. They talk about lobsters, cormorants (why was this bird associated with the devil?), whales, coral, frigatebirds, walruses and why people are moved to sail the oceans alone -- and then write books about the experience. Above all, they share their enthusiasm for Herman Melville's maritime masterpiece Moby-Dick and ask how a book about killing whales might actually be a proto-ecological text.

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).

How do the oceans work? And how have they influenced human history? In this episode of the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University, Jonathan Bate interview Helen Czerski - Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University College London, presenter of TV science documentaries, and author of Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes our World (subtitle of US edition: How the Ocean Works).  Listen for an array of fascinating stories: why did Antony and Cleopatra lose the world-changing battle of Actium that heralded the rise of the Roman empire? What does the earwax of whales tell us about their stress levels during the Second World War? How do you build a ship to withstand the crushing weight of ice in the Arctic?

You can listen to Helen's Ocean Matters podcast here and follow her on any of these platforms:
Mastodon: @[email protected]
BlueSky: @helenczerski.bsky.social
Instagram: helen_czerski  https://www.instagram.com/helen_czerski/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-czerski-045b956/
Threads: @helen_czerski

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).

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).