Rate My Professor Helen Rozwadowski

Helen M. Rozwadowski is a professor of History and founder of the Maritime Studies program at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. She graduated from Williams College with a B.A. and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. Rozwadowski has worked both as a public historian and in academia. Her teaching encompasses environmental history, history of science, public history, and interdisciplinary maritime studies courses. Her research specializations include the history of ocean sciences, history of the ocean, law of the sea, and undersea exploration in the 1950s and 1960s.

Rozwadowski's major publications include the book Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (2018), which traces the human relationship with the ocean from evolutionary time and argues for historicizing technologies and knowledge systems in ocean histories. Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (2005, paperback edition 2008) won the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize for the best book directed to a wide public audience and details the mid-nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discovery of the ocean depths. She also authored The Sea Knows No Boundaries: A Century of Marine Science Under ICES (2002), chronicling twentieth-century marine sciences supporting international fisheries policy. Rozwadowski has co-edited three volumes pivotal to the history of oceanography: Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea 1800-1970 (2017), The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment (2004), and Extremes: Oceanography’s Adventures at the Poles (2007). She co-edits the University of Chicago book series Oceans in Depth. Notable articles include “Maury for Modern Times: Navigating a Racist Legacy in Ocean Science” (Oceanography, 2020, co-authored with Penelope K. Hardy), “Ocean Literacy and Public Humanities” (Park Stewardship Forum, 2020), “The Spaces in Between: Science, Ocean, Empire” (Isis, 2014, co-authored with Michael S. Reidy), “Arthur C. Clarke and the Limitations of the Ocean as a Frontier” (Environmental History, 2012), and “Oceans: Fusing the History of Science and Technology with Environmental History” (2010). Her honors include the Ida and Henry Schuman Prize from the History of Science Society, the William E. & Mary B. Ritter Fellowship from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and fellowships from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, UConn Humanities Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. Through her scholarship, Rozwadowski has significantly influenced the field of ocean history.