By Kellie Britch, College of Arts and Sciences
USF’s Blue Humanities program will launch its spring 2026 online symposium, “Keywords in Blue Humanities,” with an in-person event, on Feb. 12, at USF St. Petersburg’s Nelson Poynter Memorial
Library. The program will continue to host a three-part online symposium, which will start the next day and run through May, featuring scholars and creatives
from around the world who will speak about the rich exchange between art, humanities
and water.
“Blue Humanities, a term coined by the symposium’s keynote speaker, Steve Mentz, is
a broad, interdisciplinary field that uses the humanities to explore our relationship
with the marine world,” said Thomas Hallock, a professor in the Department of English, the Florida Studies program and the Blue Humanities program on the USF St. Petersburg campus.
For Hallock, this work is not only important, it’s personal. In 2024, Helene made
landfall in Florida as a category 4 hurricane, and Hallock and his spouse, Julie Armstrong,
watched as the storm surge reached within a block of their St. Petersburg home.
“At that moment, ‘climate change’ no longer became an abstraction,” Hallock said.
“Blue humanities matters because, while oceans have not held the center of attention
in the humanities for some time, our seas are making it quite clear that they have
not forgotten about us.”
Steve Mentz, a professor and chair in the Department of English at St. John’s University
and author of the first textbook on the blue humanities, will be on campus for the
official launch of the program, which unites the work of existing projects and programs at USF, including the Gulf Scholars program and the CRESCENDO project.
“The blue humanities asks each of us to reimagine our relationships with that most
intimate of the elements, water,” Mentz said. “In this age of sea level rise and tropical
storms, not to mention drought in California and flooding in Germany, human interactions
with water are taking on new urgency. We hope this symposium and lecture series will
introduce students and the community to new ideas and methods of thinking and acting
with the water that flows through our communities, our bodies and our ecosystems."
Learn more about the Blue Humanities at USF.