Oceans as Archives

Kristie Patricia Flannery is a historian of colonialism and its legacies, particularly in the lands and oceans that the global Spanish empire once claimed to rule. Her book Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World was published with Penn Press in 2024. She is a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University. Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022 to 2025, she is a global professorial fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (2009) and Across Oceans of Law (2018), which was a finalist for the UK Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). Mikki Stelder grew up along the Zaan River at the mouth of the North Sea, is Assistant Professor of Global Arts, Culture and Politics at the University of Amsterdam, and a former Marie Skłodowska Curie Recipient. Stelder's publications include “A Sinking Empire” (Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities) and ""The colonial difference in Hugo Grotius: rational man, slavery, and Indigenous dispossession"" (Postcolonial Studies), which received the ASCA Article of the Year Award (2022). Stelder co-edits The Gloria Wekker Reader (Duke University Press). The video essay that accompanies Stelder's chapter in Oceans as Archives was part of the group exhibition Unimaginable: Clarion Calls for Rising Seas and can be found at www.mikkistelder.com.