Upcoming Events
Global Performance in a Port City: Rouen c. 1610
In this talk Dr. Wikström will take us on a tour of the bustling, multicultural port city of seventeenth-century Rouen and demonstrate how the urban center’s position in global trade networks helped shape theatrical performance there. Focusing on Nicolas Chrétien des Croix’s 1608 tragedy The Unfortunate Portuguese, he will explore the ways in which playwrights in Rouen simultaneously addressed local urban issues—in this case the historically overlooked presence in the city of Marranos expelled from Portugal—and global concerns—the ethical and legal questions of border crossing, refugee status and hospitality provoked by the contact of previously separated European and African cultures in a globalizing early modern world. This talk is supported by the Gore Chair and Lavin Bernick funds in French, the Tulane Global Humanities Center, and Lavin Bernick funds for PARIFA (Performance and archival research in the Francophone Atlantic).
How Deep-sea Mining Lands
Deep-sea minerals, often framed today as a new solution for green-tech demand, have been imagined as a resource frontier for nearly seventy years. Mid-20th-century debates over mining manganese nodules—especially in zones beyond coastal control—shaped both scientific inquiry and emerging ocean law. Although commercial mining never materialized, its anticipated impacts strongly influenced negotiations during the third UN Law of the Sea Conference (1973–1982). This talk considers how the specter of deep-sea mining has shaped debates over how to use and live with the ocean. It does this by attending to three coastal sites where deep-sea mining has come ashore: Msida, Malta, which hosted the first Pacem in Maribus conferences in the early 1970s; Kingston, Jamaica, which has hosted the International Seabed Authority since 1994; and New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, which is a contemporary frontline for resistance against nearshore deep-sea mining.
The Lynchpin of Maritime Asia: Southeast Asia as the Oceanic Center of Asia
This presentation will discuss some of the ways that we can see Southeast Asia not as a “marginal” region between two hegemonic “centers” of civilization—India and China—but rather as the opposite. I argue through most of my work that Southeast Asia was actually the central connective tissue between all of Asia’s seaways, becoming an important region in its own right in the evolution of any concept of “Asia” that we might hold to be self-evident historically. By virtue of a string of monographs and volumes, I argue for a stronger place for this region in the maritime history of Asia, the most dynamic region in the world.
Debashree Mukherjee
Debashree Mukherjee is a film and media scholar based in New York. She teaches at Columbia University and edits the journals Screen and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Her first academic book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (September 2020), does a deep dive into histories of filmmaking in late colonial India. This book was partly inspired by her own work experience in Mumbai’s film and TV industries in the mid-2000s. Currently, she is at work on a second book that is tentatively titled “Tropical Machines.” Her areas of specialized interest include visual culture, media theory, film and photography, postcolonial technology studies, feminist historiography, and environmental humanities—with a focus on South Asian diasporas and the Indian Ocean world region.
Horizontal Comparison: Africa, the Caribbean, and the Making of Black World Literature
Cajetan Iheka makes the case that Black Atlantic and comparative literary studies have an Africa problem: they still privilege the United States and Europe as the primary loci of reference. He offers a long-overdue recalibration of literary studies by foregrounding affinities between Africa and the Caribbean, reorienting the geographies of Black internationalism and the methodologies of comparative world literature. By positioning African and Caribbean texts as mutually constitutive rather than derivative of Western paradigms, the discussion demonstrates how these literatures articulate new forms of transoceanic solidarity and theorize complex modes of Black worldmaking.
Past Events
New Stories for a New Climate
A conversation between coastal geologist Torbjörn Törnqvist and writer Nathaniel Rich will explore the challenges of researching and writing about a future rendered unrecognizable by climate change. The discussion will braid the central insights of Törnqvist’s recent research on the future of the Gulf South and Rich’s new novel, Cloudthief, about a disillusioned climate journalist who takes up a second career in crime. How does geological history and storytelling shape our cultural understanding of the climate crisis? After all seems lost, what remains?
Michael Cohen & Shennette Garrett-Scott
This conversation brings together historians Michael Cohen (Jewish Studies) and Shennette Garrett-Scott (History & Africana Studies) to examine how enterprise has shaped—and been shaped by—racial, religious, and regional formations in the United States. Moving beyond narrow accounts of business history, the discussion considers how economic practices, financial infrastructures, and communal networks have structured possibilities for belonging, mobility, and power. Cohen’s work on how trust and ethnic networks operated in lieu of collateral, and how occupying different social fears kept Jewish people largely outside the mainstream financial systems, intersects with Garrett-Scott’s work on Black financial institutions exploring how ideas about credit, financial literacy, and economic justice have been mobilized as claims to freedom, even as they reveal the possibilities and limits of banking as a pathway to it. Together, they explore how communities navigate economic and communal opportunity and constraint.
Doing Global Humanities Research: Telling Diasporic Histories through Oral History and Digital Tools
Join Dr. Nikki Brown, an award-winning historian and digital humanities scholar, as she shares how oral history, photography, and emerging technologies can recover stories of diaspora, migration, and resistance. Drawing on her projects ranging from Afro-Turkish communities to post-Katrina New Orleans, she shares how scholars can use humanities and digital tools, including AI LLMs, to tell stories that exist beyond conventional archives and that move across borders, languages, and disciplines.
This is an interactive session. Bring your project questions, challenges, and ideas as we collectively explore research, storytelling, and the future of the humanities.
How Peter the Great Sank in the Baltic Sea: Commemorating the First Seafaring Russian Emperor in Riga, Latvia (and Elsewhere)
In 1915, for fear of encroaching German armies, a monument to Peter the Great created by Berlin sculptor Gustav Shmidt-Cassel was removed from its pedestal in central Riga, present-day Latvia’s capital city, which the emperor had conquered in his quest for seaports in 1710. The monument was dispatched to Saint Petersburg for safekeeping, yet never arrived: the ship carrying it, the Serbino, was attacked and sunk by a German destroyer. And so the German equestrian monument to the Baltic conquests of Russia’s first seafaring emperor was itself lost at sea in the course of the war with Germany that brought both Latvian independence and the dissolution of the empire Peter built. If this were a dream, Freud would have described it as overdetermined. This lecture will spin out from this moment into consideration of historical myths and realities relating to Peter the Great and the water, the ports of the Russian Empire, the distinctions between sea-based and land-based empires, and those between capitalist and state socialist ones. We will touch on other monuments to Peter along the way, including Saint Petersburg’s Bronze Horseman, the subject of Alexander Pushkin’s famous poem of that name, landlocked Moscow’s grotesque post-Soviet monument to Peter (a repurposed monument to Columbus), and the more recent fate of the Riga monument, which was recovered by Estonian divers in the 1930s, more recently reassembled, yet never reinstalled on any official pedestal in independent Riga.
Global Port Cities, Transnational Religious Networks, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Campaign for Justice
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), the pioneering African American journalist and activist for racial and gender justice, will be the focus of a presentation and conversation between Heather Curtis, Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, and Nghana Lewis, Professor of English and Africana Studies at Tulane University. Their discussion will examine Wells-Barnett’s engagement with emerging transnational religious reform networks shaped by the circulation of people and ideas through major port cities. Curtis and Lewis will also reflect on the continuing relevance of Wells-Barnett’s work for contemporary debates about justice, rights, and equality within and beyond the United States.
A Sea of Ink: print cultures of early modern Manila
Rethinking Scope and Significance: Lessons from Singapore and Malaysia
These two talks are in conversation with one another in their shared interrogation of how “the global” is constructed and contested in Southeast Asia—one through the lens of early modern print culture in Manila, the other through Cold War-era Singapore and Malaysia. Both challenge dominant narratives of globalization by centering overlooked local actors, objects, and moments as sites of negotiation, resistance, and meaning-making.
Political Ecology of the Gulf of Mexico
Shannon Lee Dawdy will discuss political ecology as a framework to think about material flows within the Gulf of Mexico over the longue durée, particularly as it relates to trade, fishing, and oil extraction. She argues that human history can be more accurately mapped through connective waters than through porous national borders. The Gulf’s key role in the Earth system and its rich ecology have overridden imperial designs time and time again. The Gulf is not only a force of nature but a force of history.
Tulane Global Humanities Center Inaugural Symposium
From January 22–23, 2026, the Tulane Global Humanities Center hosted its inaugural symposium on the biennial theme, Global Port Cities. Find information about the symposium and see recordings of the panels .
Dr. Lama Elsharif
Dr. Lama Elsharif will present a talk that examines how the port city of Tunis under Ḥammūda Pasha, bey of Tunis (1782–1814), functioned as a center of governance. Rather than examining North Africa’s port cities through fragmented lenses that cast them either as quarantine stations, corsairing bases, commercial gateways, or cosmopolitan crossroads, this talk brings these dimensions into a single frame to show how they collectively shaped political authority in Tunis. A key port city in the early modern Mediterranean, Tunis was both a harbor of power and a point of vulnerability, strategic for diplomacy and trade yet exposed to wars, epidemics, and scarcity. Dr. Elsharif argues that the convergence of these pressures transformed Tunis into a laboratory of governance, where coastal life and imperial politics intersected and where rulers defined and tested power at the water’s edge.
Constructing the Laissez-Faire Narrative of Industrialization: Hong Kong at the 1970 World Expo
Macabe Keliher, Professor at Southern Methodist University, will present “Hong Kong at the 1970 World Expo and the Myth of Free Market Industrialization.” Dr. Keliher explores how the Hong Kong pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka presented a narrative of free trade and laissez-faire economics that came to impact all subsequent interpretations of economic development right up to the present day. He argues that this narrative was a particular interpretation of Hong Kong’s development and, contrary to existing understandings, it was not natural but rather actively constructed in response to an unstable international context that threatened economic development.
Deconstruction and Improvisation: Experimental Humanities Today
Dr. Ana M. Ochoa Gautier & Hannah Chalew
Dr. Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, Tulane professor and ethnomusicologist, and Hannah Chalew, visual artist, will present a short talk on their research and then have a conversation around the shared themes of extraction, aurality, arts, and port cities found in their work.
An Ocean of Air-Rights: Speculative Reconstruction in Contemporary Mumbai
This talk contrasts and explores two exemplary moments in the growth and urban development of the colonial port city of Bombay from the 19th century to its present avatar as Mumbai, a center of global speculative capital. Connecting the colonial opium trade to the city’s morphology and physiognomy, we explore the contemporary effort to redevelop Mumbai through the planning instrument of air rights and the forms of collective urban life that might be produced in its wake.
Tulane Global Humanities Center: The Launch
This opening panel discussion of the Tulane Global Humanities Center explores the center’s biennial theme of Global Port Cities.