2025 Season Lecture Series
Presented by
Join us at the Museum for our in-person lecture series, and click here to watch recordings of previous online lectures.
Keri Watson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Central Florida
Picturing Paradise: From John James Audubon to the Florida Highwaymen
​
Wednesday, January 22, 5:30pm
​​​​
Cost: $10 or FREE for Museum Members (memberships to be confirmed upon registration)
​​​​
Florida is home to 45 distinct terrestrial ecosystems, and these diverse geologies have supported and inspired artists for centuries. William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon came in search of native flora and fauna, followed by Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, and Winslow Homer, who were lured by Florida’s natural beauty and warm climate.
Later artists, including the Florida Highwaymen, earned their livelihoods selling paintings of Florida’s landscape to tourists up and down US1 and A1A. This talk offers an engaging history of Florida's landscape through art and how artists’ representations of Florida demonstrate an interconnectedness of nature and culture.
​
Keri Watson is Assistant Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Central Florida, where she also serves as the director of the Florida Prison Education Project. She serves on the board of the Association of Historians of American Art, is Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is the author of Florida's New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals (2024), Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations In Higher Education (Palgrave, 2023), This is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States (Oxford, 2023), and the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (2022).
Stephen Hesterberg, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Gulf Shellfish Institute
Shellfish Aquaculture in Florida: Its Status and Potential in a Rapidly Changing State
Thursday, February 13, 5:30pm
​​
​Cost: $10 or FREE for Museum Members (memberships to be confirmed upon registration)
​
Shellfish aquaculture is still a relatively nascent industry in Florida but has the potential to provide a ‘win-win-win’ for the state’s economy, food security, and environment. However, stressors such as population growth, harmful algal blooms, heatwaves, and hurricanes threaten its existence.
This talk will present an overview of the industry, its benefits to Floridians, and possible futures depending upon our collective actions. It will also present the Gulf Shellfish Institute’s vision for a successful merger of industry with environmental restoration, known as restoration aquaculture.
Dr. Hesterberg is a marine ecologist with a background in the ecosystems of Florida's Gulf Coast, including oyster reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass beds. His past research has a strong emphasis on molluscan biology and ecology. He leads the Gulf Shellfish Institute, which focuses on expanding the production of hard clams, oysters, and scallops along Florida’s Gulf Coast for economic and environmental benefit.
Dr. Elizabeth Shea
Director of Collections and Curator of Mollusks, Delaware Museum of Nature and Science
Exploring the Atlantic Canyons: Searching the Deep Ocean for Cephalopods and Other Marine Life​
​
Thursday, March 13, 5:30pm
Cost: $10 or FREE for Museum Members (memberships to be confirmed upon registration)
​
Cephalopods (such as squids and octopuses) are charismatic mollusks found in all marine ecosystems, from shallow coral reefs to the deepest oceans. They are difficult to study because they are fast swimmers and highly cryptic on the ocean bottom, but video exploration provides new opportunities for observation and to collect data on their distributions, habitat preferences, and behaviors.
In this presentation, Dr. Shea describes research cruises exploring deep-sea canyons off the U.S. East Coast that helped identify preferred habitat for deep-sea corals and describe the animals that live around them. Photographs and videos of a variety of deep-sea cephalopods will be shown and discussed.
Dr. Elizabeth Shea is the Director of Collections and Curator of Mollusks at the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science, where her primary responsibilities include oversight of the 2.3 million shells in the Museum’s collection, and collections-based research. She completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College with a research focus on the ecology and biodiversity of cephalopods. She has published 27 peer-reviewed papers and participated in more than 20 research cruises to the canyons and seamounts in the northwest Atlantic.
Mark Kurlansky
Author
The Rise, Fall, and Renewal of New York Harbor’s Oysters ​
​
Thursday, April 3, 5:30pm
​
Cost: $10 or FREE for Museum Members (memberships to be confirmed upon registration)
​​
New York Times best-selling author Mark Kurlansky explores the remarkable ecological history of the celebrated oysters of New York Harbor. These oysters were at first native, then imported from Chesapeake Bay, became globally famous delicacies, and ultimately were destroyed as New York Harbor was ruined by pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries. For 50 years now there have been efforts to restore the harbor and its oysters.
​
Kurlansky’s talk reveals this remarkable ecological, social, and environmental story, which is the subject of his best-selling book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (2006). It will also consider related issues including the problems of building cities in the estuaries of great rivers.
Mark Kurlansky has written 39 books, among them the celebrated The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. Other prominent titles include Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, and Salt: A World History. Kurlansky has also worked as a journalist for decades, with articles appearing in Audubon Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, New York Times Magazine, and many more. He began his career as a playwright.