Ali Glassie

Ali Glassie received her Ph.D. (English) from the University of Virginia in 2019. Her research explores the ways that the ocean’s biology, physical dynamics, and cultural histories influence the literature of the Americas; in doing so, it draws upon her professional experience at sea and her M.A. in Marine Affairs (University of Rhode Island). Ali’s current book project, Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms, offers a circum-Atlantic study of 20th- and 21st-century literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that takes comparative literature offshore. In order to chart the migrations of a more expansive tradition of sea literature around the Atlantic Rim, the study centers a congeries of shapeshifting beings—including seal-human selkies, sea-creaturely mariners, and sea deities of the African diaspora—who embody marginalized ways of encountering the ocean. By revaluing the maritime epistemologies represented by these ambiguously gendered, ambiguously human figures, Atlantic Shapeshifters explores questions of identity along with the entanglements between humans and marine ecosystems. It proposes, moreover, that by attending to these relations, sea literature helps us imagine just, multispecies futures on a climate-changed ocean planet on which we are at once castaways and shipmates. This research informs Ali’s teaching in global Anglophone literature, literature of the Americas, cultural studies, and literature and the environment, and aboard sailing vessels in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Ali has published most recently in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and sx/salon, a literary platform of the Caribbean studies journal. Small Axe. Coriolis and Blue Water Sailing have also published her work. Her research has been supported by awards from the UVa Center for the Americas/Centro de las Américas, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and by a Mellon Graduate Fellowship.