Ryan Tucker Jones, History, and 2024–25 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.
This interdisciplinary global history integrates the newest, exciting advances in whale science to reinterpret the last 500 years of human-cetacean relations. In the past decades, satellite tagging, drone footage, DNA analysis, and long-term behavioral studies have revealed whale lives in unprecedented detail. The newest cetacean science not only reveals ways that whales experienced this history, but also casts new light on the crucial global stories of colonization, industrialization, and the creation of a modern, interconnected world.