Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingly turned toward maritime spaces, revealing the sea not merely as a sublime backdrop but as a haunted archive where colonial violence, environmental catastrophe, and spectral histories continually return. This seminar proposes a dialogue between Blue Humanities and the Gothic by examining how oceans, rivers, and littoral zones emerge as spaces of haunting in world literature. Rather than viewing water solely as a life-giving ecosystem, we invite participants to explore aquatic environments as repositories of submerged histories, colonial violence, and climate anxiety. Across literary traditions, water repeatedly becomes a site where the living encounter the dead and where memory refuses burial. 

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Gothic narratives are deeply indebted to maritime imaginaries. Madeline Potter’s study, ““My ghastly tale is told”: Hearing the Ancient Mariner’s Tale in Frankenstein and Dracula”, reveals how Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) establishes an enduring Gothic grammar of oceanic confession, haunting both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The cursed mariner’s compulsion to narrate becomes a transhistorical mode through which the sea preserves traumatic memory and unfinished ethical obligations (see Haunted Shores). When this sensibility extends to the sea, as in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing (2018) and Soumya Ayer’s The Ghost of Malabar (2022), the Indian Ocean transforms into a haunted archive. Its depths hold the memories of conquest, slavery, and ecological devastation, while its haunted shores bear witness to the return of the repressed colonial past.

Building upon these conversations, this seminar asks how contemporary climate change transforms oceans and rivers into new Gothic landscapes. Rising seas, disappearing islands, flooded cities, melting glaciers, and toxic rivers have increasingly resemble the haunted geographies long associated with Gothic literature. The seminar also seeks to examine how religious, mythological, and Indigenous understandings of water intersect with contemporary ecological crises. Across diverse traditions, from Biblical flood narratives and the Apocalypse to Hindu cosmologies of sacred rivers, Islamic eschatological waters, Caribbean Ocean deities, and Indigenous aquatic ontologies, water functions simultaneously as creation, purification, remembrance, and destruction. Rather than reading these narratives as predictive truths, this seminar considers how scriptural and mythic imaginaries provide comparative frameworks through which contemporary environmental crises acquire ethical, symbolic, and cultural meaning.

POSSIBLE THEMES
Haunted Waters: Oceans, Rivers, and Other Aquatic Spaces as Gothic Geographies
Ghosts of the Ocean: Spectrality, Shipwrecks, and Maritime Memory
Colonial Violence and the Gothic Waterscape
The Indian Ocean as a Haunted Archive
Littoral Gothic: Shores, Islands, and Borderlands as Spaces of Haunting
Shipwrecks, Drowned Worlds, and the Gothic Imagination
Rising Seas and Drowning Futures: Flooding as Gothic Imaginary
Toxic Waters: Pollution, Ecological Horror, and the Gothic
Naufragocene, Thalassocene, and the Gothic Sea
Hydrocolonialism and the Spectrality of Aquatic Spaces
Wet Globalization and the Gothic Afterlives of Empire
Water Deities, Monsters, and Nonhuman Aquatic Agencies
Women, Water, and the Gothic: Gendered Bodies in Aquatic Spaces
Migration, Exile, and the Haunted Sea
Island Gothic: Insularity, Isolation, and Ecological Vulnerability
Transoceanic Hauntings: Circulation, Memory, and Literary Form