How Sea Shanties Evolved with Society: A Free Workshop with Prof. James Seth

Sunday, April 13th, 2025
2:00-4:00 pm (Pacific Time)
FREE Workshop

3015 NW 54th Street Seattle, WA 98107
(Ballard Locks, Visitor Center Auditorium)

This workshop will focus on early sea songs from the 16th and 17th centuries and how they transformed over time, coinciding with social, political, and cultural shifts. Prof. Seth will also address the ways that these songs (as well as shanties, anchor songs, and ballads) shifted when they were sung on multilingual and multiethnic voyages.

NOTE: Venue has limited space

PRESENTER: Dr. James Seth is an Associate Professor of English at Central Washington University. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, maritime literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and gender and sexuality. He is also a faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at CWU.

He has published on early English shipboard performance, Shakespeare and oceanic folklore, and early modern maritime visual art.

His first book, Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages: The Lives of the Seafaring Middle Class, was published by Amsterdam University Press in June 2022.

ABOUT HIS BOOK: “Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages aims to tell the full story of early English shipboard performers, who have been historically absent from conversations about English navigation, maritime culture, and economic expansion. …maritime performers served many communicative tasks. Their lives were not only complex, but often contradictory. Though not high-ranking officers, neither were they lower-ranking mariners or sailors. They were influenced by a range of competing cultural practices, having spent time playing on both land and sea, and their roles required them to mediate parties using music, dance, and theatre as powerful forms of nonverbal communication. Their performances transcended and breached boundaries of language, rank, race, religion, and nationality, thereby upsetting conventional practices, improving shipboard and international relations, and ensuring the success of their voyages.

This project made possible by a grant from 4Culture