Margaret Cohen has spent much of her life thinking about the ocean, not as a horizon line, but as a force that has quietly shaped how we see, imagine, and understand the world.
When I photographed her at the Cowell Theatre before her Long Now talk, there was a steadiness to her. A kind of calm attention. She listens closely, then answers in a way that feels both precise and expansive. You get the sense that she has spent years sitting with big ideas, letting them settle, turning them over until they reveal something deeper.
Margaret is a professor of English at Stanford University, where her work has traced the relationship between literature, technology, and the sea. She moves easily between disciplines. One moment she is talking about nineteenth century novels, the next about diving helmets, submarine cables, or early underwater imaging systems. The through line is perception. How we come to know environments that resist us. How we build tools to extend ourselves into places we were never meant to go.
Her book The Novel and the Sea explores how maritime life shaped one of the most important literary forms in Western culture. The novel, in her telling, is not just a product of cities and salons. It is also a product of ships, trade routes, storms, and long passages across open water. The sea imposed its own rhythms and uncertainties, and those conditions found their way into narrative form.
In The Underwater Eye, she turns her attention below the surface. What does it mean to see underwater. What happens when light behaves differently, when orientation shifts, when the body itself becomes unstable. The book moves through centuries of attempts to enter that world, from early diving bells to modern submersibles and imaging systems. It is as much about technology as it is about perception. Every tool we build changes what we can know.
There is something quietly radical in the way Margaret approaches these questions. She does not treat the ocean as a metaphor. She treats it as an environment that demands new ways of thinking. Underwater, the assumptions we rely on break down. Distance, scale, direction, even the idea of a stable viewpoint begin to slip. In that space, knowledge is always partial, always mediated.
Her work sits within the environmental humanities, but it resists easy categorization. It draws from literary history, media studies, and the history of science, but it never feels abstract. There is always a physical world underneath it. Salt water, pressure, darkness, the slow diffusion of light. You can feel the environment pressing back against the idea.
What makes her work compelling is that it reframes something we think we already understand. The ocean covers most of the planet, but for many of us it remains distant, flattened into images or reduced to data. Margaret asks what it would mean to take that distance seriously. To recognize that our knowledge of the ocean is always filtered through instruments, stories, and inherited ways of seeing.
Spending time with her, you begin to notice how much of human thought has been shaped by environments we rarely inhabit directly. The sea is one of them. Vast, dynamic, and resistant to control. It has influenced exploration, trade, conflict, and imagination for centuries. It has also shaped the technologies we build and the stories we tell about risk, discovery, and the unknown.
Margaret’s work does not offer easy conclusions. It opens space. It invites you to look again at something familiar and realize how little of it you actually understand.
And maybe that is the point.
