Title: Sponge Fishing, Cultural Heritage, and the Island of Kalymnos
Speaker: Dr. Joyce Goggin, Associate Professor English Language and Culture, University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Location: University of Amsterdam, PCH building, Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam, room 1.05
Time: 15:30
Abstract
In this talk, J. Goggin discusses Aegean sponge fishing and the island of Kalymnos in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with the culture practices it gave rise to, and the enormous costs it exacted in terms of animal life and environmental damage. While sponging was the bedrock of island economies throughout the Aegean and elsewhere around the Mediterranean, it became a mono-industry on Kalymnos where it involved the entire population, beginning in the 1830s. The lives of Kalymnian ship captains, investors, divers, and the women of Kalymnos were directly impacted by the sponge trade, which informed virtually every aspect of daily life on the island, from the long tradition of diving associated with Kalymnos, to domestic economies based on this highly dangerous, often fatal occupation, which in turn gave rise to cycles of permanent debt. At the same time, Kalymnian sponging funded schools and public institutions on the island and inspired cultural production, from the “traditional” dance of the paralyzed sponge diver to novels, short stories, poetry and songs about the tragic lives of divers and the captains who exploited them.
Bio
Joyce Goggin is Associate Professor at the UvA (Dept. of English Language and Culture). She has published several edited books and numerous articles on a wide range of topics including “Sponging and the Island of Kalymnos: Rural, Industrial, Global”, in Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (Brill 2025). She is the editor of Aegean Sponge Fishing and the Island of Kalymnos: An Ethnography and Industrial History (Brill 2024), and her most recent work on popular culture will be published in Taylor Swift and Fandom: Aesthetics, Addiction, Im(media)cy, Performance, Economy, edited with Maryn Wilkinson, and forthcoming with Palgrave in 2026. Goggin’s work on Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth will also be published in 2026 with Boydell and Brewer, in Women, Money, and Markets, a collection of essays of which she is also co-editor.