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From sea serpents to seaweed, slimy things have long tended to lurk among the frontiers of natural knowledge, reflecting not only the anxieties of each age but also, in many cases, new possibilities. At once generative and destructive, mysterious and manifest, and masculine but sometimes feminine, slime flowed through oceanic understanding and welcomed new people to contribute to it, thereby producing natural knowledge both literally and figuratively “from the bottom up.” Across an expanding Atlantic world Africans, Native Americans, women, and even pirates described the ocean’s currents, creatures, and coastal environments, adding their observations to the growing body of knowledge about the physical and biological makeup of the sea. Indeed, as this presentation posits, close focus on the sea’s slimy things and the curious people drawn them may even provide new ways of imagining the ocean’s present and future.Christopher L. Pastore is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he teaches courses in environmental history, early America, and the Atlantic world. He holds a Ph.D. in History and M.S. in teaching from the University of New Hampshire, an M.F.A. in nonfiction creative writing from New School University, and a B.A. in Biology from Bowdoin College. He is the author of Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Harvard University Press, 2014) and is currently writing an environmental history of the Atlantic world from the ancient period through the nineteenth century.
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21 Fairground Ave., Ballston Spa, NY, United States, New York 12020
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