Agenda

WATERSCAPES | Shifting Shorelines and the Geo-poetics of Water

23 June 2026 | 4 PM CEST

Presenters:
Lydia Barnett (Northwestern University)
Corey Byrnes (Northwestern University)
Harris Feinsod (Johns Hopkins University)
Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago)
Joshua Stein (Woodbury University)

What forms of aesthetic, cultural, and spatial production emerge where land and water meet?
Amphibious spaces have long been sites of erosion and terraformation; they are also spaces where art, science, architecture, and literature are made and remade as they move into the world. While ports, islands, shorelines, and other liminal zones have long been of interdisciplinary interest in the humanities and social sciences, the interplay between the production of land from water and cultural production more broadly remains critically understudied.

This presentation brings together members of Shifting Shorelines (Lydia Barnett and Corey Byrnes, Northwestern University), the Tidewater Initiative (Harris Feinsod, Johns Hopkins University), and the Geopoetics of Urban Rivers (Jennifer Scappettone, University of Chicago, and Joshua Stein, Woodbury University), an informal consortium of scholars dedicated to cultural production and disintegration at land-water interfaces around the world. Working across the disciplines of history, literary and visual studies, architecture, and art practice, we share interests in (and concerns about) histories and practices of reclamation, sedimentation, erosion, and environmental destruction and restoration. Through our exploration of a range of watery zones and histories, our scholarly and artistic consortium mobilizes diverse disciplinary perspectives and methodologies that surface a geo-poetics of our terraqueous world.

Our collective presentation will showcase several sites of land-building and -unbuilding from the 16th through the 21st centuries across the Northern Hemisphere: The cartographic history and construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea; The dredging of shipping channels in the Port of Baltimore; The history of swamp-scaping in early modern Bologna; The erosion of architecture into the Po River watershed; And the literary urbanism of the Venetian archipelago itself. Through diverse case studies, we highlight the need for a global-comparative, collaborative, and transhistorical approach to land-water interfaces and watery aesthetics.