About

Welcome!  I'm Kelly, a.k.a. Dr. Kelpy to my students.  I teach and write about ocean biodiversity from a historical/cultural perspective, currently as a Salish Sea Institute Fellow at Western Washington University studying basking sharks in the Northeast Pacific.

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I combine archival research with my underwater experience as a dive pro to help connect people to our one global ocean.  I've published on the cultural history of cephalopods, the whale's body as palimpsestic text, the history of captive belugas, and other ways in which social and environmental justice are historically inextricable. 

I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area but spent every summer in a cabin with no electricity or running water on a small island in northwest Washington state.  Most of my twenties were in England, first as an exchange student at Cambridge then for a PhD in Victorian Literature at the University of London. 

After a decade away from the Northwest which included a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, expedition work in the Arctic, and serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Ocean Literature at the Williams College-Mystic Seaport Ocean and Coastal Studies Program, I returned to Seattle in 2018 and reside on the traditional territory of the culturally- and linguistically- diverse Coast Salish peoples.

Today I’m also a Board Member at the Center for Open Exploration and PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer.  When I'm not teaching or underwater (or teaching underwater) you can find me rowing a wooden boat around the Salish Sea.

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Learn a bit more about my research or check out some of my course syllabi!

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