# PORTUGUESE 185 - Sea Theory Semester: Fall | Year offered: 2026 | Link: [Course Website](https://locator.tlt.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-226266/2026/fall/14441) This course explores the sea as a principle of literature, culture, and history in medieval and early modern Portugal and Brazil. It covers a broad range of textual genres and cultures of writing to understand how the sea, the oceanic, and the aquatic functioned as the basis for understanding and shaping real and imagined experiences, encounters with the new and the unknown, and history and time. From poets to chroniclers and from cosmographers to geographers, we will collectively explore how the sea was construed as a basis of seeing and understanding the world, and how a maritime manner of interpreting realities emerged as a result of overseas voyaging and oceanic expansion. --- [### Josiah Blackmore ](/people/josiah-blackmore) Nancy Clark Smith Professor of the Language and Literature of Portugal Portuguese Section Leader Portuguese Undergraduate Advisor Academic Degrees: B.A., M.A., Ohio State Univ., Ph.D., Harvard Univ. ITT International Fellow (Univ. de Lisboa) Research Interests: Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese Literature and Culture; Camões; the Maritime Humanities; Lusophone Imperial/Colonial... ![Joe](/sites/g/files/omnuum8296/files/styles/hwp_4_5__690x865/public/2025-04/blackmore.jpg?itok=T65WOoGB) See also:- [ 70-100 ](/class-categories/70-100) - [ Josiah Blackmore ](/instructor/josiah-blackmore) - [ Portuguese ](/language/portuguese) - [ Fall 2026 ](/term/fall-2026)