The Department of English and Creative Writing and Core Conversations program invited Professor Faye Hammill from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss the symbolic nature of ocean liners within 20th-century modernity on Feb. 17. Hammill’s work ties closely to Colgate’s core curriculum, with many classes examining 1920s art and literature in relation to maritime transnational exchange.
Ocean liners are high-speed ships that carry passengers between ports on a fixed schedule. Hammill has been working on this project about these ships and their role as symbols of modernity since 2018. It is just now coming to an end as her book, published with Liverpool University Press, is coming out soon. She has also been working with Maritime Heritage, where she has had the opportunity to work with several old ships, highlighting her maritime work in Glasgow.
“The idea of the ocean liners is one that you can study in the context of transnational exchange — through mobility and travel, but also through literary text, which would be helpful for the students [and] teachers on that [Core Conversations] program,” Hammill said.
Hammill also shared her interest in ships as tourist attractions and museum objects.
“I’ve got quite interested in how the ships are remembered and how they turned into tourist attractions if they’re still existing — or if they’re ones that have been broken up, how they’re remembered in museum displays and models,” Hammill said.
Hammill described how this focus has given her a better understanding of the context of shipping histories and the experience of people who are involved with shipping, not only in Scotland, but also internationally. Hammill visited ENGL 157: The Jazz Age. Professor of English Michael Coyle described the department’s choice to bring Hammill.
“I brought Professor Hamill here from the University of Glasgow because I think the kind of work that she was doing might be of special interest to the Colgate faculty teaching [Core Conversations],” Coyle said.
Coyle emphasized the analytical approach that Hammill has taken as opposed to typical historical ones when examining ocean liners.
“She’s one of the leading scholars in my field, modern studies,” Coyle said. “She’s been doing this work on ocean liners and the ways in which they embody certain developments in one’s culture, and she’s been studying it through the analysis of literary text. Usually, these things are studied from the point of view of a historian or a sociologist.”
Hammill began the lecture by providing a brief overview of ocean liners, including their definitions and history. She described how the modernist ocean liner relates to geometrics, emphasizing the vessel’s visual and structural design — including layered decks and spatial arrangements — which modernist writers used to represent hierarchy and the aesthetics of modernity. She then described how these geometries are evoked in literary narrative, allowing people to imagine themselves in the ships while understanding the deeper meanings involved with them. Hammill discussed the origins of the ocean liner, dating back to the Victorian era in the mid-nineteenth century, and explained how they were emblematic of progress at the time.
“I think people are very excited about [the ships] visually,” Hammill said. “I was thinking about how those visual things translate into the written text and how poets, playwrights and novelists try to capture that visual drama.”
Hammill went on to discuss how dazzle camouflage ships were introduced during World War I. This design breaks up their geometric outlines, helping disguise its shape and movement. She connected this to the idea of “dazzle poetics,” where both poetry and music attempt to capture the sensory augmentation associated with these ships. Hammill drew upon Armando Mazza’s poem, “Transatlantico” (1919), which showed the ocean liner as a heightened sensory experience, comparing its movement to the nude human body to create an almost erotic connection between the machine and physical sensation.
She continued to analyze literary case studies, including works of T.S. Eliot, who she claimed depicts the ship through sharp, cubist imagery, presenting the engine as a hard, deliberate machine that reflects the geometric movement of modern travel. Hammill also analyzed Anita Loos’ novel, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” where Loos depicts wealth during the Jazz Age, as well as Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell’s “All at Sea.” The play offers an anti-modernist perspective, presenting the liner’s exterior as both beautiful and unsettling, like a runaway skyscraper on water. Additionally, the book “Vers un Architecture” by Le Corbusier argues to abandon architectural habits of the past and instead embrace modern machinery such as ocean liners.
One of Hammill’s main points was about what happened below deck, showcasing how ocean liners were shaped by strict class hierarchies and hidden labor and calling for an alternative way for scholars to narrate steamships. Referring to texts like “The Hairy Ape” by Eugene O’Neill and “Romance in Marseille” by Claude McKay, Hammill highlighted how workers’ experiences revealed the physical demands and inequalities that made passengers’ comfort possible, as these works accurately evoked steamship labor as well as different forms of mobility.
Sophomore attendee Leah Gans commented on this depiction of social stratification.
“What stood out most to me was Hammill’s focus on how the art and stories that emerged from ocean liner culture centered primarily on upper-class passengers,” Gans said. “The ship functioned as a symbol of modernity, but it also concealed the labor and social hierarchies that made such progress possible.”
Hammill explained that while ocean liners once symbolized modern progress and class hierarchy, some scholars argue they were eventually replaced by the skyscraper as the dominant image of industrial modernity and capitalist hierarchy.
She concluded that literary and visual texts can help reveal the hierarchies that ocean liners enforced. Reflecting on her research, Hammill noted that ocean liners were once central to everyday travel and modernity, but they now feel like a lost form of art, representing a cultural shift over time.
