About

Professor Liang Wu’s teaching and research focus is on blue humanities, political economy, and critical mobility, globalization, maritime, science and technology, labor, environmental, and policy studies. Since 2006, through ethnographic fieldwork at ports, onboard, overseas, and online, he has been studying the lifeworlds and lifeways of seafarers – maritime workers delivering 90% of international trade who largely come from the Global South regions of Asia. His work specifically delves into the technoeconomic, infrastructural, legal, geographical, social, and environmental conditions and ramifications of container shipping in the postwar era (see dissertation abstract).

Professor Wu speaks more than six languages and as a first-generation college student, an international graduate student in the U.S., and now a post-PhD engaged scholar for a sustainable and socially-conscious future, he has been crossing boundaries and bridging academia, policy, and society. He is a former mariner and Science Communication and Marine Policy Specialist at the federal government, and is currently an interdisciplinary researcher examining the human dimensions and socio-environmental politics and dynamics of what is known as “the 4th Propulsion Revolution.”

Professor Wu’s classes are dynamic, multimodal, student-oriented, and innovative. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the role of power, the historical and social contexts and constructions of various phenomena, as well as the diversity and complexity of humanity. His classes cover a variety of topics and themes, address current affairs and social issues, and enhance students’ analytical and critical thinking and writing, holistic and in-depth case study, and overall collaboration and communication skills.

Specifically, his oceanic anthropology course “Peoples of the Sea: Sailors, Pirates, Fishers, and More” enhances students’ understanding of the relationship between humanity and the sea. It engages with ethnographic studies of a variety of peoples of the sea to discuss how their modes of navigating, habituating, laboring, and relating generate particular temporalities, spatialities, socialities, and cosmographies, including symbolic cultural forms, patterns of affect and effect, senses of location and delocation, and ways of knowing, living, working, and organizing that often defy hegemonic and land-centric views and practices.

Professor Wu’s interdisciplinary 2025 Short Term course “Global Capitalism and the Sea: Society, Economy, and Environment” examines the complex intersection of translocal and international economy, society, and the sea. The variety of topics to be explored ranges from the transatlantic trade to whaling, polar cruising, industrial fishing, container shipping, oil drilling, offshore wind, marine biotechnology, submarine cables, and deep-sea mining. The course equips students with highly timely and critical knowledge and perspectives of maritime history, oceanic studies, political economy, political ecology, and environmental anthropology and sociology in our globalized oceanic world of the Anthropocene.

Book and Documentary Recommendations

Education

Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
M.Phil. in Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
M.Phil. in Anthropology at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Awards

2024 Bates Faculty Development Fund
2024 Waterfront Alliance Waterfront Scholarship
2024 Wenner-Gren Post-PhD Research Grant
2022-23 John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship
2021-22 Center for Engaged Scholarship Dissertation Fellowship
2021-22 Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies Dissertation Fellowship
2021 Waterfront Alliance Waterfront Scholarship
2021 Digital Initiatives Connect New York Fellowship
2019-20 Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship
2019-20 Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
2019-20 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant

Selected Publications & Multimedia

Wang, Lu, Caitlin Adams, Allison Fundis, Janet Hsiao, Casey Machado, Mashkoor Malik, Rachel Quadara, Coralie Rodriguez, Adam Soule, Kelley Suhre, Liang Wu, and Aurora Elmore. 2024. “Broadening Inclusivity at Sea.” Frontiers in Marine Science 11.

Wu, Liang. 2024. Containerization of Seafarers in the International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, and Mobility Politics of Global Logistics. Doctoral dissertation. CUNY Academic Works.

Copeland, Adrienne, Liang Wu, and Mashkoor Malik. 2024. FY22 NOAA Ocean Exploration Competitive Grant Program Fiscal Report. NOAA Ocean Exploration.

Wu, Liang. 2022. “Stranded at Sea: International Seafarers Shipping 90% of Global Trade and Lessons from the Supply Chain Crisis.” Knauss Lunch & Learn 2022. NOAA Central Library Seminars.

Wu, Liang. 2022. “Ocean Co-Exploration Through Advanced Human-Robot Interaction.” NOAA Ocean Exploration.

Wu, Liang. 2022. “Advances in Deep-Sea Sampling with Soft Robotics.” NOAA Ocean Exploration.

Wu, Liang. 2022. “Instrumentation to Assess the Untainted Microbiology of the Deep-Ocean Water Column.” NOAA Ocean Exploration.

Levinson, Marc, and Liang Wu. May 3, 2021. “The Containerization of Shipping and its Global Consequences with Marc Levinson and Liang Wu.” The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. International Horizons Podcast.

Love, Stephanie, and Liang Wu. 2020. “Are We in the Same Boat? Ethnographic Lessons of Sheltering in Place from International Seafarers and Algerian Harraga in the Age of Global Pandemic.” Anthropology Now 12(1): 55-65.

Wu, Liang. 2011. “Sailing on a Neoliberal Sea: Multinational Seafarers on Container Ships.” Hong Kong Anthropologist 5.

Affiliations

Atlantic Black Box

American Geophysical Union (AGU) Thriving Earth Exchange

Collaborative Accelerator for Lawful Maritime Conditions in Seafood (CALM-CS)

Marine Social Sciences Network

Waterfront Alliance

Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI)