Gillis Blue Humanities Forum: Jeffrey McCarthy
Scholar, sailor, and writer Jeffrey McCarthy presents Participate in the Polycrisis: Blue Humanities Now.
Shipwreck symbolizes our environmental future – grand forces sweep us either towards dissolution or reinvention. Which way will we go? The ocean is the very soul of this metaphor because the ocean is the protagonist of contemporary environmental collapse. College of the Atlantic is the perfect place to explore the polycrisis besetting America. Likewise, the Blue Humanities is the perfect lens to focus the impending threats and opportunities. “Participate in the Polycrisis” offers ocean insights from an environmental humanist and ocean sailor dedicated to communicating the issues and surviving the consequences.
Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy has written four books and many academic articles. He has also published in both popular sailing media and climbing magazines. His books include Contact: Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking (University of Nevada Press, 2008), Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Conrad & Nature: New Essays (Routledge, 2019), and Re-envisioning the Anthropocene Ocean (University of Utah Press, 2023). His most recent essay “Lawrence’s Environmentalism: From ‘Pastoral’ to Anthropocene Rebirth” appears in Reading D.H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Mellon Fellow to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and he has held research fellowships to the National Humanities Center, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. He was the Director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Before that, he was a Professor of English and the founding Director of Environmental Studies at Westminster University.
The Gillis Blue Humanities Forum is an interdisciplinary exploration of oceans, waterways, and aquatic life as central forces shaping culture, history, and environmental thought. Bringing together scholars, artists, and activists, the series invites audiences to rethink human relationships with water in an era of climate change and ecological urgency. This series was created in honor of John Gillis by his wife, Tina.