This course focuses on great literary documents of seafaring in its historical and environmental aspects. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the encounter with the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? How can we discern a history of the “trackless” oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that “90% of everything” crosses an ocean, and the seas are described as both rising and dying?

This course, conducted as a humanities research lab, focuses on the Port of Baltimore and its relation to other world seaports. We explore literary works focused on Baltimore’s harbor, and compare and connect them to works set in other port cities from New York City to the Panama Canal Zone. Alongside this, we study the function of modern ports—their “critical logistics,” environmental challenges, and roles in creating civic imagination. We’ll conduct field visits at dredge facilities, marine terminals, and sites of postindustrial redevelopment, and we will visit archives that record the changing shape of the port of Baltimore. This is a literature class because our questions are about stories: how do Baltimore and those who live or travel here tell the story of the seaport? What stories are missing? What does it mean to recover them? Answering such questions requires historical and archival methods and observational techniques, so students should bring to the class a spirit of curiosity and openness to collaboration and experimentation.