In the wake of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, the blue humanities have emerged as a field of study that emphasizes the centrality of aquatic environments in understanding interactions between humans and nonhumans. This interdisciplinary field, which initially grew out of Anglophone literary criticism, proposes to shift our terra-centric perspective by adopting the seas and oceans as a new vantage point to rethink our understanding of both the planet and literature (Klein, 2002; Blum, 2008; Bailyn, 2005). Originally developed in the United States within the field of Oceanic studies (Blum 2010; Cohen 2010; Mentz 2009), the “Blue studies” have since expanded and become increasingly decentered and diversified. Not only do they now incorporate non-Western perspectives (King 2019; Perez 2020; Mentz 2022), but they have also broadened their scope and now encompass all forms—or bodies—of water: lakes, rivers, glaciers, rainfall, coves, as well as wetlands such as marshes, bayous, peatlands, and estuaries. While oceans quickly attracted the attention of scholars in the environmental humanities, wetlands long occupied a more marginal position within the field. In recent decades, however, these environments have experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest. For example, a Wetland History Research Group, bringing together historians, geographers, and legal scholars, was established in 2003 in France. Likewise, the works of Buell (2005), Navakas (2018), and Kumar and Pradhan (2024) invite us to explore the imaginaries of wetlands through the lens of literature.

Hybrid spaces between land and water, wetlands have long been perceived as hostile, unproductive, or even dangerous environments. The imaginary surrounding fetid and stagnantwaters associated with swamps is a testimony of this fact. For instance, as early as 1773, the anonymous author of American Husbandry described the swamps and marshes of South Carolina as “stinking sinks and sewers” that “exhal[e] such putrid effluvia, as must necessarily poison the air” (p. 374). In the perspective of a colonial project, European settlers have attempted to drain these spaces in order to contain, domesticate, and make them hospitable according to the European standards of land management. Since then, the perception of wetlands—bayous, marshes, swamps, bogs—has changed. Far from arousing fear or distrust, these spaces are now recognized as biodiversity-rich zones requiring protection, which Edward Maltby describes as “the new wetland paradigm shift.” Thus, wetlands have lately emerged as privileged sites for rethinking not only terrestrial or continental imaginaries, butalso the colonial, economic and geopolitical dynamics that shape all terraqueous spaces.

This symposium, open to scholars working on all geographical areas, offers to examine “wetlands” from historical, artistic, cinematographic and literary perspectives. It will also consider submerged areas resulting from natural aquatic disasters or human intervention. As fragile interfaces between land and water, these spaces constitute zones of transition, circulation, and vulnerability, where relationships among humans, territories, and the living world are continuously reconfigured. Hybrid in nature and often situated at the margins of inhabited spaces, wetlands challenge colonial and imperial narratives by serving as sites for alternative histories and forms of storytelling. At the same time, when shaped by natural or human-induced disasters, wetlands become powerful expressions of contemporary environmental crises.

Supported by the Environmental Humanities research group of the CECILLE (ULR 4074), this symposium encourages reflection on the ways wetlands are traversed, colonized, inhabited, managed, or adapted to. It also invites participants to examine, across diverse geographical and linguistic contexts, how these environments are represented, questioned, and historicized.

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

• Imaginaries surrounding marshes, swamps, wetlands, and coastal landscapes
• Wetlands and narratives from the margins, borders or liminal spaces
• Representations and cultural histories of wetlands
• Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives
• Indigenous narratives
• Political, ecological, and legal discourses surrounding wetlands
• Extraction, drainage, development, and destruction of wetland environments
• Ecopoetics and ecocriticism of wetlands
• Cartographies, imagined geographies, aquatic spatialities
• Climate disasters, flooding and resilience

This symposium will be held on Friday, 11 December 2026, at the University of Lille, France (Campus Pont de Bois). Please submit your 350-words abstracts and short bios to Emilia Le Seven (emilia.le-seven@univ-lille.fr) and Solveig Dunkel (solveig.dunkel@univ-lille.fr) by October 1, 2026.

Selected Bibliography

Bailyn, B. (2005). Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Harvard University Press.

Blum, H. (2010). “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies”, PMLA, vol. 125, n° 3, pp. 670-677.

Buell, L. (2005). “Wetland Aesthetics”, Environmental History, vol. 10, n° 4, pp. 670-671.

Cohen, M. (2010). “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe”, PMLA, vol. 125, n° 3, pp. 657-662.

Gearey M., Church A., Ravenscroft N. (2020). English Wetlands: Spaces of Nature, Culture, Imagination. eBook, Palgrave MacMillan. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41306-4

Giblett R. (1996), Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Howarth, W. (1999). « Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands », New Literary History, vol. 30, n° 3, p. 509-539.

Klein, B. (Ed.). (2002). Fictions of the sea: Critical perspectives on the Ocean in British literature and culture. Routledge.

King, T. L. (2019). The Black Shoals: Offshore formations of black and native studies. Duke University Press.

Kiviat, E. (2021). “Wetland Imagery in American Novels”, Social Sciences and Humanities Open, vol. 4, n° 1. doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100158 

Kumar N., Pradhan S. (2024). “Exploring the Ethical and Aesthetic Representations of Wetlands in Literary Texts: A Comparative Ecocritical Study”, 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature. The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, vol. 30, n° 2, pp. 21-34.

Mentz, S. (2009). “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature”, Literature Compass, vol. 6, n° 5, pp. 997-1013.

Mentz, S. (2022). “Blue Humanities”, in Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_68-1

Navakas, M. (2018). Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Opperman, Serpil (2023). Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene. Cambridge UP. 

Perez, C. S. (2020). “‘The Ocean in Us’: Navigating the Blue Humanities and Diasporic Chamoru Poetry”, Humanities, vol. 9, n° 3, 66. doi.org/10.3390/h9030066