The Texas coast is home to the waters that raised me. Even though I no longer live on the Gulf Coast, my experience growing up in the shadow of industrialized seas still motivates how I move through the world today. I have carried that into my professional career as an interdisciplinary humanities scholar with training primarily in the history of science and technology.

After receiving my MA from Oregon State University’s Environmental Arts and Humanities program, I completed a doctoral degree in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s History of Science, Medicine, and Technology program.

I will be joining the University of Cincinnati in Fall 2026 as its first Assistant Professor of Blue Humanities.

Broadly, my research focuses on the role of the ocean sciences and structures of global ocean governance in shaping how humans have valued and made decisions about Earth’s saline spaces. My current book project, tentatively titled Where Sea Meets Soil, builds on my dissertation, which dragged me into the deepest reaches of the Gulf and forced me to confront the imperial histories of knowledge-making that gave those depths shape. My focus on the marine geosciences is a response to histories that treat oil and gas as commodities circulating in the public sphere, above the water line, disconnected from the habitats where they are found. Instead, I emphasize the influential role of the industry expertise and commercial knowledge-making practices that made hydrocarbons legible below the sea’s surface. In doing so, I show that the Gulf was a crucial space of knowledge-making and a key to understanding the epistemic origins of environmental enclosure. Offshore hydrocarbons need an environmental history, and that history is, unequivocally, an ocean history.

contact: snewton4(at)wisc(dot)edu