Graduate Forum
The Blue History Network Graduate Forum is a series of seminars on topics related to blue history, inviting scholars to join an ongoing conversation on key themes within this rapidly emerging field. The fluidity of water as a shared point of reference facilitates new connections and insightful discussions across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and the Graduate Forum aims to incorporate a broad range of perspectives and engage a wider audience.
Each session will have an overarching theme and some suggested starting points, but participants are warmly encouraged to draw connections to their own research and interests during the discussions. The Graduate Forum will be hosted at Leiden University in spring 2026, with the option to attend online, and is open to all scholars interested in blue history, whether to share and deepen existing expertise or explore exciting new ways of conceptualizing and working with history.
Coordinator: Ylva Axelsson (Leiden University)
Sign up for further information through this link: Google Form
Session 1: Water Frontiers
March 31st, 15:00-17:00
Location: Huizinga 2.60 (Leiden University)
Introductory speaker: Flora Roberts (Utrecht University)
Throughout history, water has challenged the limits of human imagination. From coastal networks to imperial expeditions, the presence of water has fueled enterprise and development, inspiring maritime exploration, scientific progress, and colonial expansion. This seminar, inspired by the work of Helen Rozwadowski, will consider water as a frontier in the broadest sense of the word. Perceived as a limitless expanse of endless possibility, but also as a commodity to be harnessed, the legacies of ambitious projects to chart, circumnavigate, and control bodies of water continue into the present. Though often framed within discourses of prosperity, civilization, and development, the reality of human interactions with this ‘frontier’ is far more complex, inspiring atrocities as well as advances. Rather than viewing it as a static backdrop to developments within histories of imperialism, science, and discovery, this seminar restores water to the center of these stories.
Session 2: Water Governance
April 14th, 15:00-17:00
Location: Huizinga 2.60 (Leiden University)
Introductory speaker: Mark Squillace (University of Colorado)
Managing water, from ensuring clean drinking water to mitigating environmental disasters, has always been a political venture. Given the centrality of water to human existence, the policy choices made have tangible impacts on all levels of society, from the local to the global. And these impacts are rarely felt equally. Hierarchies of power and influence have long histories of facilitating legislation that disproportionately disadvantages marginalized communities, often the ones already most vulnerable to environmental changes. Further, the inherent fluidity of water, and its defiance of neat political and geographical categorizations, make it an unruly entity to govern, especially when policy-makers bring their own stakes to the table. Despite attempts to depoliticize and present water governance as neutral and objective, decisions on water management have always been deeply political, evolving in parallel with the societies they have helped structure. This seminar will consider these political and legal histories of water, tracing the roots of past and present water governance and (in)justice in the face of increasingly global challenges.
Session 3: Water Movements
May 7th, 15:00-17:00
Location: Huizinga 2.60 (Leiden University)
Introductory speaker: Maud Rijks (Leiden University)
Changes in perceptions and governance of water have, traditionally, been slow, top-down processes. However, especially in the face of changing landscapes and impending crises, social movements have emerged to assert and defend the rights of people, communities, and the planet itself. These movements are associated with a broad range of issues, from everyday water and sanitation access to coastal regions facing environmental devastation, and come from all levels of society. Grassroots activists and powerful international NGOs alike are united by water as a truly global cause for concern, but their specific aims and methods differ, sometimes causing conflict and unintended consequences for the causes they champion. Environmental activism has emerged powerfully since the mid-twentieth century, but challenges to dominant water policy and discourses go back much further, although these dissenting voices have often been marginalized. This seminar will focus on the historical roots and underlying structures of these water movements, to better understand their increasing prominence, and expanding roles, in the past decades.
Session 4: Water Worlds
May 26th, 15:00-17:00
Location: Huizinga 2.60 (Leiden University)
Introductory speaker: Ifor Duncan (Utrecht University)
Human history is deeply intertwined with blue history, continually influencing, and being influenced by, the waters that surround and sustain us. But even as the world enters into an era increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene, identifying humans as the dominant geological force, one thing remains clear: humans depend on water, but water can, has, and likely will continue existing entirely independent of us. Fittingly, historians increasingly foreground the natural world as a dynamic entity in its own right, rather than a marginal backdrop for human affairs. Some shift the focus away from humans entirely, defying and expanding upon traditional definitions of what, exactly, constitutes a historical actor. Others broaden the scope of human histories, adopting new approaches to examine our shifting, fluid relationships with water. Challenging the very foundations of traditional methods, frameworks, and disciplinary divides, these more-than-human and deep histories of water will be the focus of this final session.
