This project develops new insights into Ivan K. Aivazovsky, his seascapes, this genre more generally, the Black Sea region (or network), and related issues of politics and identity. Specifically, it revises and enhances my doctoral dissertation on Aivazovsky for publication as an academic monograph and creates an associated digital history project. These bring our understanding of Aivazovsky’s work up to date, with the first study to apply to it a set of theoretical frameworks that span history, art history, and cultural history. It both traces an underexplored link between the making of seascapes and the shaping of modern historical imaginations and functions as a case study that fundamentally revises our traditional understanding of seascapes. By recovering Aivazovsky’s oeuvre in this respect, this study develops a lens through which to view imperial, national, and local identities undergoing non-predetermined but powerful processes of transformation. Essentially, this project helps to open these up for exploration as complex clusters and interactions of individual creativity documenting physical and imagined spatial identities. Also, a new chapter on Aivazovsky and Istanbul makes a fresh contribution to the scholarship on this city.