Here are the links to the recordings of the online panels and plenaries at Sea Changes 2025, held on 6 September. (Unfortunately, those for Panels 1 and 2 were lost owing to technical problems. The papers and debate were all excellent and very inspiring; we do apologise to attendees and especially to the presenters concerned.)
Part 1
Plenary 1: Forging the mermaid in Romantic Scotland
Dr Katie Garner (University of St Andrews)
Introduced by: Bill Hughes
Panel 4: Romanticism and sirens
Chair: Daisy Butcher
Prof. Judith Thompson (Dalhousie University), Let ‘brooks and echoing falls repeat’: John Thelwall’s Fairy of the Lake
Amanda Trainham (SUNY), ‘Farewel, ye Fair Illusions’: The Distorted siren’s song in Dryden’s King Arthur and Shadwell’s Psyche
Part 2
Panel 5 – Myth and storytelling
Chair: Ryan Denson
Dr Antonio Alcalá González (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Santa Fe Mexico City), Tlaloc and Chac Mool over Mexico City: The haunting of Aztec water deities on Mexico City
Agelika Velissariou (AUTh, School of Primary Education, Thessaloniki)
Panel 8 – Mermaids, hybridity and the aquatic environment
Chair: Ivan Phillips
Dr Francesca Arnavas (University of Tartu), Dark and watery metamorphoses: Mermaids, dystopian fiction, posthumanism
Jubby Kumar (Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya), Breaking the shell: How modern mermaid fiction rewrites the Disney Princess
Shareed Mohammed (University of the West Indies), The Haitian Voodoo river gods: The shamanic call in Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder
Part 3
Panel 6 – Traumas, threats, and transformations: Traditional and contemporary selkie stories from Scotland to the Arctic
Chair: Silvia Storti
Colleen Taylor (Boston College), Mermaid love and seal hunting: The complexities of the Irish seal skin
Dr Lizanne Henderson (University of Glasgow), Preternatural phocids: seals, selkies and the imagined sea
Part 4
(Google Drive) Sea Changes 2025 Online_Part4
Panel 7 – Light and shade in ‘The Little Mermaid’
Chair: Rebecca Greef
Alexa Keough (University of Hampshire), Slipping off the sealskin: Examining the nuances of intimate partner violence in selkie mythology
Protyasha Mazumbar (University of Hertfordshire), ‘Part of Your world’: The reinterpretations and retellings of ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837) based on the history and society of the human world
Dr Barbara Barrow (Lund University), Water, desire, and crisis in the Southern Bayou: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s ‘Natalie’ as a modern mermaid tale