Up Against Erasure | Faculty Book Talk: Gillen D'Arcy Wood

Professor Gillen D'Arcy Wood (English and Earth Science & Environmental Change) will discuss his book, The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline. The book received the 2026 Watson, Helen, Miles, and Audrey Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. The prize honors books in the history of science directed to a wide public.

About the speaker: Gillen D'Arcy Wood is Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, where he is founding director of the undergraduate Certificate in Environmental Writing. His 2014 book Tambora (Princeton) won the Kendrick Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, while his most recent book project, The Wake of HMS Challenger (Princeton) was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship and the Davis Prize by the History of Science Society in 2026. He is the author of four other books and numerous articles on nineteenth-century culture, science, and environmental history. His new research focuses on seabirds and biodiversity heritage islands.

About the The Wake of HMS Challenger: In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its goal: to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger’s naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition’s achievements are the stuff of legend. It identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench. It measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since. And, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS Challenger, Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.

The Challenger’s scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encountered a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS Challenger offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet’s final frontier.