Dr. Liang Wu is a Postdoctoral Associate of Environmental Humanities in the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) as part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the interdepartmental consortium Cornell Oceans. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is a former Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College and a Science Communication and Marine Policy Knauss Fellow at the U.S. federal agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), having sailed on the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer for a deep-sea expedition.

Dr. Wu’s interdisciplinary maritime research and teaching bridges social oceanography and blue humanities, political ecology and economy, and critical mobility, technology, labor, policy, globalization, and Anthropocene studies. He seeks to understand the complex relationship between humanity and the oceans, and examine the intersection of the transregional economy, society, and environment of the sea and beyond, especially in this age of the Great Acceleration and the Blue Acceleration. Dr. Wu’s scholarship has been widely recognized and supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Engaged Scholarship, and Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies among other funding agencies.

Since 2006, through multisited ethnographic fieldwork at ports, onboard, overseas, and online, Dr. Wu 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 Asian countries, including the Philippines, China, India, Indonesia, etc. His work specifically delves into the techno-economic, infrastructural, legal, geographical, social, and environmental conditions and consequences of container shipping in the postwar era, thereby unraveling the structural and systematic workings of the global material economy on which contemporary societies depend.

Dr. Wu’s postdoctoral research examines shipping decarbonization that involves the developments of alternative fuels, digital technologies, and green corridors at sea as part of the “4th Propulsion Revolution.” He is looking at the socio-environmental politics and dynamics of such endeavors on the ground and the deck, and above and below water, bringing together natural and social sciences, and academia, industry, policy, and society. Specifically, Dr. Wu argues that Global-South seafarers are increasingly tasked with performing industrial and planetary sustainability as hands-on environmental technicians through their changing everyday, embodied seamanship and seakeeping across and beyond jurisdictions and the Anthropocene Ocean.

Dr. Wu is teaching at Cornell a course on ocean technopolitics and global futures about a variety of contemporary and emergent sea-based sociotechnical systems such as industrial fishing, offshore energy, marine biotechnology, deep-sea mining, and geoengineering; he is joining and leading interdisciplinary seminars, and giving lectures at and outside Cornell while working on his publications, including his book project The New Leviathan which argues that the postwar shipping industry has constituted a planetary regime in which the imperative of cargo mobility authorizes technocratic power over human and nonhuman lives and the environment. His work tackles the sea and “power” – in its various senses from propulsion to organization, governance, and resilience.