臺大外文系學術演講
NTU DFLL Ex-position Talks & Faculty Colloquium
Title: Oceanic Churn: The Blue Humanities
Speaker: Dr Britton Elliott Brooks (Associate Professor, Kyushu University, Japan)
Moderator: Dr Sophia Yashih Liu 劉雅詩副教授 (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University)
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Venue: Room B208, Humanities Building, NTU (臺大人文館B208室)
Abstract:
The Environmental Humanities have, until recently, focused largely on terrestrial matters. In response, scholars have initiated a shift towards understanding the entangled relationship between humans and the ocean across history: the Blue Humanities. As Serpil Oppermann notes, it is a ‘truly transdisciplinary field’ which studies our world’s waters from ‘sociocultural, literary, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and multiple other perspectives’, all fundamentally informed by oceanography. This lecture will explore the aqueous currents of blue humanities scholarship, its applications in medieval studies, as well as future projects that reveal the potency and necessity of diving into the churning waters of our blue planet.
Bio:
Britton Elliott Brooks is an author, indie video game designer, public speaker, and associate professor at Kyushu University in Japan. He attained his DPhil (PhD) in Medieval English Literature at the University of Oxford. His research centres on early medieval English literature (both Old English and Anglo-Latin) and the environmental humanities, with increasing focus on the blue humanities. His publications include his 2019 monograph Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, the edited collection Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England, as well as a number of articles, including several stemming from his recently completed Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) grant project Early Medieval Soundscapes. These include ‘The Sound-World of Early Medieval England: A Case Study of the Exeter Book Storm Riddle’, a book chapter in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval England, and ‘Sonic Journeys on the Open Sea: Testing the Faithful in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature’, in the journal The Review of English Studies. He has just begun a five-year research project, also supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), titled Knowing Oceans: The Early Medieval English North Sea, which will investigate human interaction with the North Sea in the British Archipelago throughout the early Medieval period (c. 500–1200).
