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This course focuses on great literary documents of seafaring in its historical and environmental aspects. Writers and filmmakers may include Columbus, Douglass, Melville, Conrad, Carson, Cousteau, Walrond, McKay and Sekula. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the encounter with the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? What part did seafaring play in the formation of international legal systems, or in epochal events such as the American and Russian Revolutions? How does contemporary piracy compare to its “golden age?” How can we discern a history of the “trackless” oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that “90% of everything” crosses an ocean, and the seas are described as both rising and dying? Our focus in the course will be on writers and filmmakers listed above, but our approach to what is sometimes called “Blue Humanities” or “ocean studies” will be interdisciplinary, and so we will also read excerpts from historians and theorists such as Laleh Khalili, Marcus Rediker, and Jeffrey Bolster.