Wretched Waters: Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea
This talk by Dr Sam Grinsell will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment.
Wretched Waters: Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea
28 May 2025, 17:00 – 19:00
About the event:
Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. This talk will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will focus on three key moments in North Sea history: the creation of urban docklands in the early nineteenth century, the industrialisation of sea fishing in the mid nineteenth century, and migration from Europe to North America around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary images of North Sea landscapes will frame the historical discussion. Dr Grinsell will suggest that the Anthropocene creates an urgent need for histories that can not only enliven our sense of the past but also position our present as a moment of open contestation where the past is enlisted in support of rival visions of the future.
A drinks reception will take place directly after this event so please do stay and join us.
This event is organised by The Bartlett School for Architecture, the UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Transnational and Global History.
Dr Sam Grinsell
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Bartlett School of Architecture
Dr Grinsell's research concerns water in the making of space, and has appeared in the scholarly journal Environmental History and the edited volume Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750. He is currently preparing a monograph, provisionally titled Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea: Journeys in transdisciplinary history, based on his postdoctoral work; his earlier research concerned the British Empire and the River Nile. He is also one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Infrastructural History, currently in development, and is, in collaboration with Giulia Champion, running an online event series in May 2025 titled Living With Water: Agency, Materiality, Narratives, which brings together researchers from across disciplines to think together about water.
Prof. Richard Staley
Hans Rausing Lecturer and Professor in History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge and University of Copenhagen
After early work on relativity and the German physics community, over the past decade Prof. Richard Staley has focused on climate change, the relations between physics and anthropology and the cultural history of mechanics in teaching and research at the University of Cambridge, and since 2021 also the University of Copenhagen. In Cambridge he has recently been engaged in two collaborative projects with colleagues in History and Philosophy of Science, English and Geography on climate change, and on Histories of AI. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2019–25, Making Climate History develops a fundamental new perspective on the histories and geographies of climate change by linking making and knowing in the emergence of the climate sciences over the past two centuries. The project examines the entwined social, physical, and economic timescales of climate change over the entire period it took to remake climate, and to recognise that we are changing it, developing a collaborative book on the making of global temperature as the key climatic index. Richard’s work has centred on climate periodisation and paleoclimatology.
Dr Giulia Champion
Research Fellow (Anniversary Fellowship)
University of Southampton
Dr Champion's main research project, entitled (Un)Mediating the Ocean investigates how the seabed is mediated in legal, financial, scientific, infrastructural and cultural documents and interventions as part of the creation of a regulatory framework for deep-sea mining by the International Seabed Authority. The project explores questions about Just Energy Transition, Civil Society engagement with the International Seabed Authority negotiations and In/Tangible Underwater Cultural Heritage. In 2022, she was a Green Transition Fellow at the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. She volunteers for the International Commission of the History of Oceanography and is a co-convenor for the Haunted Shores Network and the Reading Decoloniality Group and a collaborator on the Ecological Reparation Project. Her work has been published in journals including Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Journal of Energy History and Ocean and Society.
Further information
Ticketing
Ticketed and Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes