Anna Guasco’s journey from the Channel Islands to Oregon State University's College of Liberal Arts
Anna Guasco
By Katie Livermore, CLA Student Writer - May 21, 2025
Searching the ocean on a whale watching boat in the Santa Barbara Channel, Anna Guasco would always hear the story about how the gray whale went from being known as the “devil fish” to the “friendly whale”.
Back in the days of Yankee whaling, gray whales were named the “devil fish” for being particularly ferocious.
“I heard about how These whales we were seeing in the channel we had to stay 100 yards away from,” Guasco said. “But if you go down south, just over the border in Mexico, you can touch and pet them.”
“Fascinated by the stories people tell about wildlife, I was just standing there on the boat going, ‘I need to know where that came from–both the difference in interaction and that story of ‘devil fish’ to ‘friendly whale.’”
Guasco, now a marine studies visiting professor at the College of Liberal Arts, ended up spinning these passions into her education. At OSU, she brings the same excitement to students in the major.
Growing up along the coast in Southern California, in Ventura, Guasco fell in love with the ocean. At age 10, she was already a junior lifeguard.
Academically, Guasco was “all over the place”–she was interested in everything. By high school, however, she was committed to environmental science. After all, she was passionate about the planet and its conservation, particularly when it came to marine mammals.
Guasco’s first post-high school job was at Channel Islands National Park. Guasco’s role consisted of managing volunteers for a native plant restoration program, working as an interpretive guide, and occasionally assisting with researchers’ fieldwork on the islands.
In high school, Guasco completed a project on Steller Sea Lions, fascinated by the different explanations for why Steller Sea Lions had declined in the Gulf of Alaska. However, she realized it wasn’t the scientific questions she was passionate about—it was the human aspects. Guasco’s intrigue lay in the cultural, political, and economic reasoning behind environmental science.
Toward the end of high school, Guasco was leaning toward marine ecology.
Guasco went to college in a very different climate. In 2016, she swapped the California sun for snowy Minnesota at Carleton College.
“I really liked the student-centric environment at Carleton,” Guasco said. “The professors were really accessible. Whether it was working with a professor on an independent study project or whatever else, it was a very friendly academic environment.”
Guasco landed on American studies as her major as a way to combine her qualitative, humanities-based approach to science.
“American studies was just a great way to bring together a little bit of history, a little bit of cultural studies, a little bit of politics, and a little bit of English,” Guasco said. “Then I brought in the science too.”
The American studies major ended up adding a place and environment track following Guasco’s and peers’ interests in incorporating more environmental analysis. For her senior thesis at Carleton, Guasco studied the role of gray whales in American history, focusing on the travel memoirs of people interacting with the “friendly whale” throughout the 20th and 21st Century.
Guasco didn’t participate in other internships during summer breaks. Instead, she returned to the consistent job as an interpretive guide back at Channel Islands National Park.
During the summer between junior and senior year, Guasco used her passion for the environment by volunteering for the late–Carmen Ramírez, who at the time was an Oxnard city councillor.
Ramírez was working to support a community effort to oppose a new coastal power plant in Oxnard, the town next to Ventura. Guasco helped through humanities and social science-based work by combing through archives and looking at policy documents.
Working with “Carmen Ramírez was amazing,” Guasco said. “Being able to contribute a small amount to that” – that community effort for environmental justice – “ really made me see that you could do things other than science and have that kind of contribution.” This experience helped her begin to see a pathway in using humanities and social science research to contribute to efforts to shape more just and resilient coastlines.
After graduating from Carleton College, Guasco attended the University of Edinburgh for her master’s degree in environment, culture, and society.
During her master’s studies, Guasco was planning to conduct fieldwork in rural Scotland, however her disability affected her mobility and required her to use crutches. It just wasn’t feasible to travel to the Scottish Isles and hike around to interview people. Instead, she discovered her dissertation topic just down the street from her department at the National Museum of Scotland.
“I was really inspired by a gallery they had on extinction,” Guasco said. “It got me thinking about all these different questions about the stories we tell about extinction, and why the stories that we tell – particularly about animal extinction – matter, and how they can be told in ways that are not only more helpful for ecological purposes, but more socially just.”
After Edinburgh, Guasco went on to receive her Ph.D. at University of Cambridge. Her doctoral work was funded by the highly-regarded Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Guasco revisited her undergraduate research on gray whales for her Ph.D. research, analyzing the gray whales’ transformation from ‘devil fish’ to ‘friendly whale’, among other gray whale stories.
“My Ph.D. project took my original analysis of travel memoirs that mention gray whales and widened the scope to the entire migration range of the Eastern North Pacific gray whales, from their birthing lagoons in Baja California Sur all the way to the Alaskan Arctic and beyond,” Guasco said. “We wouldn't necessarily think of stories taking place in the lagoons of Mexico as being connected to what's happening in harbors in the central coast of California or further up in the Pacific Northwest or so on, but I’m interested in seeing how gray whales facilitate those connections, and how stories that are told about them end up playing important roles in big, broader things like conservation decision making.”
Now, Guasco is working to turn her Ph.D. dissertation into an accessible, academic book.
“A lot of people are interested in whales, and there's an appetite for new stories about whales,” Guasco said. “I'm interested in telling stories about whales that go beyond kind of either you love them or you hate them, you care about them or you exploit them, kinds of binaries.”
When Guasco happened upon the marine studies visiting professor position, she thought it was the perfect match.
“It was really exciting to me that the position was at Oregon State,” Guasco said. “Oregon State is, in some ways, a hub for gray whale research from a scientific perspective. When I came out to visit, it was just very clear how wonderful a fit it was. It is a really exciting interdisciplinary opportunity.”
Currently, Guasco instructs the core courses for the marine studies major, including Humans and the Ocean (MAST 201) and Society, Culture, and the Marine Environment (MAST 300). Spring term 2025, Guasco is teaching a new Ecampus course, Writing for Marine Studies (WR 444), that she’s been developing this past year.
“For the class, I'm using different examples of writing that have anything to do with the marine environment, whether academic or non academic, that apply particularly well for particular topics that we'll be talking about,” Guasco said. “It's everything from environmental historians to journalists, memoirs, podcasts, zines–all sorts of things.
Guasco also received the 2025 - 2026 Critical AI Literacy Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and OSU Libraries, in which she’ll be expanding research critically analyzing efforts to speak to whales via generative AI.
So far, she’s loved helping direct students with a love for marine topics toward more interdisciplinary avenues with the uniqueness of the marine studies program, which is one of only a few undergraduate humanities-focused marine studies programs in the country.
Guasco loves the enthusiasm of the marine studies students. For her, it’s a fun place to land in terms of a major, with the hunger to learn the human perspectives of marine science–where it all started for her.