Max Chervin Bridge

Max Chervin Bridge is an environmental historian and a historian of knowledge, science, and the body. They received their PhD in History from Brown University in 2026. Their dissertation - "Oceanic Listening: Sound, Cetaceans, and the History of Sensory Environments" - places sound at the center of human relationships with whales and dolphins and places sensory experience at the center of how human and nonhuman animal life has engaged with past environments. "Oceanic Listening" follows people, whales, and dolphins across histories of whaling labor, marine bioacoustical research, archipelagic imperialism, art, music, and popular culture to reconstruct the integral role sound has played in shaping how humans and cetaceans have known one another through different contexts. Their research has been published with Environmental History and Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. They are also interested in relationships between histories of disability and the environment. They plan to develop future research projects oriented around the environmental history of disability politics and activism in the twentieth-century United States. They have taught courses on the environmental history of disability in the United States and the history of U.S. imperialism.