Rich King

Faculty

Rich King

Visiting Associate Professor of Maritime History and Literature

Education:

PhD, Writing, St Andrews University

About

Research Areas & Interests

Sea Voyage Narratives, Marine Environmental History, Marine Science Communication

Teaching Philosophy

The global ocean is essential to human life on earth in so many profound and complex ways that interdisciplinary learning about our relationship with this dominant ecosystem and its inhabitants is natural and easy. Going out of sight of land aboard the SEA ships or learning along the coast provides ideal venues for crafting rigorous communities where we’re all learning and teaching each other: preparing, theorizing, responding, creating, interpreting, contextualizing, listening to a diversity of voices and perspectives, and just living and breathing in the salt-sea world first hand. As a professor, I’m doing my best work at SEA when I’m simply offering resources, opportunities, and new ways to think about what we’re seeing and living out on the water or beside the ocean.

Selected Publications

  • Sailing Alone: A History (Penguin/Viking, 2024)
  • Ocean Bestiary (U. Chicago Press, 2023)
  • Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (U. Chicago Press, 2019)
  • The Devil’s Cormorant (U. Press of New England, 2017)
  • Lobster (Reaktion, 2015)

Personal Interests

Dogs, drawing, surfing, reading