A movement in literary and cultural studies that, drawing on critical practices and theoretical approaches from New Historicism and new materialism, focuses on the presence of the ocean in cultural texts. As Steve Mentz demonstrates in his book At the Bottom of Shakespeareâs Ocean (2009), which is one of the foundational texts in the field, the ocean and related practices of ocean-going (including being shipwrecked) are central to a number of Shakespeareâs plays---The Tempest is obviously unthinkable in the absence of the ocean, but so is Othello, which also depends upon sea-faring---but is generally overlooked in the critical literature on them. Blue humanities is in this respect comparable to Said, Edwardâs notion of contrapuntal reading inasmuch as it seeks to give emphasis to an aspect of the text that is usually overlooked but can nonetheless be demonstrated to be crucial. For Mentz, though, it goes beyond that: it is also about re-establishing a kind of poetics of the ocean, thus re-establishing a humanistic connection with it.