The Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures at the University of Portsmouth and Royal Museums Greenwich (National Maritime Museum) invite proposals for papers, panels and posters for a two-day interdisciplinary conference exploring marginalised histories in maritime contexts from c.1500 to the present day.
Maritime history has long been shaped by narratives centred on political, military, and economic power. Yet the oceans have always been populated and impacted by maritime communities that were historically marginalised, or people whose maritime lives and labour remain overlooked or underrepresented in archives, collections, and scholarship. This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring those histories to the forefront: the workers, makers, families, travellers, navigators, communities, and knowledge-keepers who have lived and worked at the edges of visibility within maritime histories.
The conference particularly invites contributions that engage critically with marginality, whether understood through gender, sexuality, race, class, labour (including domestic dimensions of maritime life), geography and environment, Indigenous knowledge systems, and representation within museum collections and practice.
Conference themes include but are not limited to:
- Labour and working lives
- Gender and sexuality at sea
- Indigenous and non Western knowledges in maritime contexts
- Everyday and domestic maritime worlds
- Health, sickness and the body
- Oceans and environments
- Museums and research: practice, methodologies and interpretation
For detailed information on proposal guidelines, please visit the Call for Papers page here.
Deadline for submission: Please submit your proposal to research@rmg.co.uk marked as 'Maritime Margins Conference proposal' by 9:00 (GMT/UTC+1), Monday 15th June
Image at top of page: The captain and crew on board the Indian kotia type dhow Karimi (fl.1938) anchored at Colombo, Ceylon (by David Watkin Waters) P34317. Copyright: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London