A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis

Abstract

The blue humanities in the early 2020s appears on the cusp of transformation. What has over the past 20 years or so been primarily scholarship about oceans and transoceanic travel has begun to take stock of other kinds of planetary water, including the water in human bodies, glacial ice, and water vapor. This article returns to the influence of one of the sub-discipline’s important early figures, the late historian John Gillis. Thinking about Gillis’s scholarship, his legacy, and recent work that has emerged recently in dialogue with it, this article charts new courses for blue humanities scholars in coming years.