The Extracting Oceans team is deeply saddened with the loss of Emeritus Professor Elspeth Probyn, who died on April 7, 2025. Our colleague and friend will be missed terribly by us all. We extend our deepest condolences to Professor Probyn’s family and wide network of friends.
Professor Probyn was an exemplary theorist, mentor and educator whose work has been central to the establishment and development of culture and gender studies within Australia, and internationally. Her body of work includes significant scholarly contributions to the field of ocean humanities–the Extracting the Ocean online project collaboration was initiated and supported by Professor Probyn.
Here we acknowledge some of Professor Probyn generative ocean humanities contributions. Professor Probyn’s work billowed out to the global and geopolitical, for example her interrogations of the more-than-human implications of extracting fish and eating the ocean at a planetary scales, fisheries sustainability and management, and of the ocean legalities and injustice of seafarers abandoned at sea during Covid. Wielding critical cultural studies analytical tools like a filleting knife, she also analysed fisheries management approaches and their entanglements with gender, the gendered dimensions of ocean pollution, and challenged more-than-human representations, and what else a fish could be.
Professor Probyn’s legacy also lies in the quiet grace of everyday care. She listened—to fishermen’s weathered tales, laborers’ unspoken burdens, artists’ fragile dreams, marine workers’ salt-stung struggles—and amplified their voices like a lighthouse guiding stories ashore. Her compassion was steadfast: she tended to her team’s wellbeing, nurtured careers with gentle resolve, and wove connections into affective communities.
Professor Probyn’s commitment continue through the lives she steadied, the hearts she bound, and the art of care she sparked.
