PCF Talk #64 – Agenda Monthly Meeting – Hybrid
This is a hybrid event, please join in person, or via the zoom link below!
Geotechnics and the Maritime Humanities
14:00 - 14:10
Introduction
Presentation of PCFs Thematic Research Groups
14:10 - 14:50
The PCF Thematic Research Group leads and members will share recent insights and present what they have been recently working on.
14:50 - 15:05
Break
Presentations by our Guests: Stephen Ramos, Harris Feinsod, and Corey Byrnes
15:05 - 15:50
“We are a group of multidisciplinary scholars devoted to the study, stewardship, and stories of working waterfronts, coastal infrastructures, and oceans under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. Our research explores the volatile relationship between land and water, both in the context of contemporary climate change and over longer spans of time. As coastal edges fray or are hardened or softened to meet rising sea levels, at stake are the lives and livelihoods of billions of people, the survival of crucial ecosystems, and the persistence of landscapes of historical and cultural significance. The workshop is an opportunity to share strategies, itineraries, and methodologies across disciplines, institutions, and geographies to address complexity and richness of land-waterscapes and the maritime humanities.”
Ports, Infrastructure, and Territory - Presented by Stephen Ramos
Ports and infrastructural systems constitute territory across land and sea. They organize and structure spaces of foreland and hinterland for logistics regimes of extraction, labor, production, and consumption. Ports and infrastructure planning merge with biophysical systems to domesticate territory and co-create new hybrid ecologies. The presentation will review select port city histories and the geo-engineering technologies of sediment dredge and management that enable and maintain them.
Stephen Ramos (Professor)
College of Environment and Design
University of Georgia
Stephen Ramos is an international scholar of urban planning and design. His research focuses on port cities, infrastructure, energy transition, logistics, and planning history. He is founding co-editor of New Geographies, associate editor for Planning Perspectives, and editor-in-chief of the Regional Studies Association Regions and Cities book series. He participates in multiple interdisciplinary knowledge networks, publications, and boards focusing on port urbanism and port humanities.
Approaches to Baltimore Harbor: Research and Collaboration in a Port City - Presented by Harris Feinsod
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s navigational charts of the middle and upper Chesapeake Bay estuary are often titled “Approaches to Baltimore Harbor,” in reference to the complex bathymetry of the dredged navigational channels leading into the Patapsco River (dredging has been a constitutive aspect of city making in Baltimore since the 18th century). The geotechnical approach also shapes a looser interdisciplinary approach to problems and methods for port city research. Approach at once names navigational flows and figurative ways of handling a problem. This talk discusses the relation between technical research into the Port of Baltimore and interdisciplinary humanities research on shoreline transformation that structures the Johns Hopkins Tidewater Initiative.
Harris Feinsod (Ralph S. and Becky G. O'Connor Associate Professor)
Director, Tidewater Initiative
Johns Hopkins University
Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His teaching and research encompass poetry, modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the hemispheric Americas, and transnational studies. His recent work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of oceans, coasts, and working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. This work is reflected by a multidisciplinary research group, the Tidewater Initiative, which he directs.
Shifting Shorelines and Fabricated Islands - Presented by Corey Byrnes
In an age of intensifying floods, sea level rise, and coastal subsidence, shoreline retreat also coincides with new efforts to “territorialize” aquatic spaces through subsurface resource extraction, land “reclamation,” and coastal resilience planning. The presentation introduces the group’s activities and objectives as well as its points of overlap with his current book project, “Cultures of Threat,” which reconsiders contemporary Sinophobia by way of an extended history of spatial production in the South China Sea, a geopolitical hotspot and site of a massive island building project by the People’s Republic of China. In particular, Byrnes will discuss the long cartographic history of the region as a site of appearing and disappearing islands.
Corey Byrnes (Associate Professor)
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Comparative Literary Studies
Co-Lead, Buffett Institute Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group
Northwestern University
Corey Byrnes’s research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literary, visual, and cinematic cultures, spatial studies, and the environmental humanities, with emphasis on animal studies and the cultural history of shifting land-water relationships. Professor Byrnes is co-founder of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities’ Environmental Humanities Workshop and co-lead of the Buffett Institute for Global Affair’s Shifting Shorelines Faculty Working Group.
15:50 - 16:00
Break
Discussion and Questions
16:00 - 16:45
Our speakers together with Heather Houser and PCF members will have the opportunity to discuss the topics of today’s event. There will also be room to cover issues of research, methods, and partner institutions and initiatives in a border sense.
Heather Houser (Professor of English Literature)
University of Antwerp
Heather Houser’s research focuses on the environment, science, reproduction, and contemporary US culture. Before her current position, Professor Houser co-founded Planet Texas 2050, the University of Texas at Austin’s grand challenge focused on equitable climate resilience, and she served on the transportation advisory group for the City of Austin’s first Climate Equity Plan and Joint Sustainability Commission. From 2023-2025, she was a Mellon New Directions Fellow training in demography, reproductive health, and climate change at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
PCF lighthouse projects and new opportunities
16:45 - 17:00