You are warmly invited to the launch of Clare Brant's new book, Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Ocean.

What can we learn from an underwater world seen through divers' eyes?

Exploring the changing relations between humans, marine beings and ocean through the writings of divers, sea-species biographers and underwater photographers over the last hundred years, Underwater Lives brings life writing and marine sciences together in pioneering ways. It dives deep beneath the surface to reveal what life writings can tell us about this wonderful and endangered world, and offers new ways to understand how we represent the ocean.

About the speakers

Clare Brant is Emeritus Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King's College London, where for many years she co-Directed the Centre for Life-Writing Research. Awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2022-25, she is the author of Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain 1783-1786 (Boydell 2017), Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Palgrave 2006, winner of the ESSE Book Award 2008), and editor of numerous essay collections. She co-edits the Palgrave series Studies in Life Writing, and has six collections of poetry published by Shoestring Press, including Underwater Postcards (2025). She was elected a Fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2022.

Introduced by Rowan Boyson and Emrys Jones (English, King’s).

Responses will follow from:

Professor Margaretta Jolly (University of Sussex), a leading life writing scholar who has published widely on life history, auto/biography, oral history and testimony and the history of feminism.

And

Dr Killian Quigley (Australian Catholic University), Senior Research Fellow and leading scholar in oceanic humanities, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and eighteenth-century studies.

*This event is supported by King's Department of English, and King's Environmental Humanities Network and ARHS Funding Scheme.