Welcome

The Melville Society is dedicated to the study and appreciation of the nineteenth-century American author Herman Melville, writer of Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, such short stories as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” and several volumes of poetry, including Battle-Pieces and the epic Clarel.

We publish the award-winning journal Leviathan and meet twice a year for fellowship and scholarly discourse at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association.  We also sponsor International Conferences and tours every other year.

Membership and Donations

Membership in The Melville Society is open to all. For information about joining The Melville Society click here. If you want to make a special payment or if you are interested in donating to any of the various projects, endowments, and programs sponsored by The Melville Society, click here.

Special Notice & Invitation

Leviathan: Volume 16, Number 1
Now Available on Project Muse

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Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Volume 16, Number 1 is now available on Project Muse at the following link: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/leviathan/toc/lvn.16.1.html.   ​This issue inaugurates the journal's expanded book review section and contains a ​special section on the Ninth International Melville Conference, "Melville and Whitman In Washington: The Civil War Years and After," including keynote addresses by John Bryant, Ed Folsom, Kenneth M. Price, and Elizabeth Renker.  Current members of the Melville Society can expect their print copies within the next two to three weeks.

To join the Melville Society, please follow the instructions here: http://melvillesociety.org/programs/membership.

WHALING HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

Co-sponsored by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, The Melville Society,
Mystic Seaport, and the Nantucket Historical Association

June 30 - July 3, 2014
New Bedford, MA

Held in conjunction with the return of the 1841 Whaleship Charles W. Morgan
to New Bedford during her 38th Voyage

The New Bedford Whaling Museum, Mystic Seaport, Nantucket Historical Association, and The Melville Society are pleased to announce the program for the 38th Whaling History Symposium, which is being co-hosted by all four institutions. This year the Symposium will be held Monday-Thursday, June 30-July 3, 2014, to coincide with the return of the 1841 Whaleship Charles W. Morgan to New Bedford. The Morgan is making a historic 38th Voyage and will spend nine days in New Bedford. The Whaling History Symposium, first established in 1975, brings scholars, writers, artists, museum curators, and local historians to New Bedford from all over the country and abroad to share interests in whales, whaling, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, maritime history, nautical lore, and the many intriguing facets of whaling heritage worldwide. This time around, the Charles W. Morgan is the focus, but the topics covered will be wide-ranging and deeply engaging.        

Schedule
(to be updated as new information is received)

MONDAY, JUNE 30

Topic: Whaling Ports, Whaling People
Location: State Pier, Building 2
Chair: Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
Speakers:

 9:30-10:15      Peggi Medeiros, Fletcher Christian's Great Grandson George, Honour Matthews
                        Earle, Assistant Navigator, and Captain James Earle: The Morgan’s Most 
                        Fascinating Trio

10:15-11          Bill Tramposch, Butler Point: A “Safe” Harbor in Northland New Zealand

11-11:45          Betsy Tyler, Ship of Fools: Wine, Women, and Mutiny on the New Bedford
                        Whaleship William Gifford

 Call for Papers
Melville in a Global Context
The Tenth International Melville Conference
Tokyo: 25-29 June 2015

PRESENTED BY
The Melville Society in collaboration with The Melville Society of Japan
and
Keio University's G-SEC American Studies Project

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We invite you to submit proposals for panels, papers, roundtable sessions, and other formats for presentation at the Tenth International Melville Conference, which will take place at Keio University (Mita Campus, Tokyo) from June 25 (Thursday) to June 29 (Monday), 2015.The five-day conference (including a day-trip to cities by the sea in Kanagawa Prefecture, reminiscent of the days of Commodore Perry's Black Ship) will invite participants to consider Melville’s deep interest in globalism, the many contexts in which his work has been and continues to be read, and the range of uses to which his writings have been put. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

Melville and Japan

Melville and Asia

Melville and the Pacific

Melville and Whaling Culture

American Literature Association Conference

Two Panels Sponsored by the Melville Society
May 22-25, 2014
Washington, D.C.

Herman Melville’s Poetic (Dis)continuities

Herman Melville’s poetry and poetic career can be characterized as distinctly lacking in continuity. Not only does his turn to poetry signal a dramatic shift in his life’s work, his poems and collections typically defy patterns of continuum—poems embedded into prose pieces, collections strikingly departing from each other thematically and stylistically, publication ambitions and relationships to readers inconsistent and nebulous. Within individual poems, too, we witness Melville’s stylistic and philosophical fissions, abrasions, and reversals. Part of Melville’s inability to attract a wider readership and to fully enter into the canon of American poets is undoubtedly his work’s resistance to interpretive frameworks that foreground narratives of artistic evolution, development, and continuity.

Mystic Seaport's 35th Annual Symposium
"MUSIC OF THE SEA"

University of Connecticut at Avery Point
June 13 & 14, 2014

University of Connecticut at Avery Point

Co-sponsored by Mystic Seaport Museum, the University of Connecticut at Avery Point,
and The United States Coast Guard Academy

The two-day symposium is part of a three-day event whose focus celebrates the lives and work of sailors through musical performance. The first day of the symposium is free and will be held at the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut, 1084 Shennecossett Road, Groton, CT, in the Auditorium of the Academic Building.

The second day of the symposium will be held in the Greenmanville Church, Mystic Seaport, 75 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic, CT. For directions, click on “Plan Your Visit” at <http://www.mysticseaport.org/>.  The cost of the symposium at Mystic Seaport is included in the cost of admission to the 35th Annual Sea Music Festival. Go to <http://www.mysticseaport.org/event/sea-music-festival-2/>. Tickets can also be bought at the door.

1882 Training Ship Joseph Conrad at Mystic Seaport
(Photo by Dennis Murphy)

Program Schedule

Friday, June 13 , UConn Avery Point, Auditorium in Academic Building

 8:30    Coffee and Danish

 8:50    Welcome: Moderator Craig Edwards

 9:00    Peter Wood, “Not Bold Nelson’s Praise: Songs About Horatio Nelson and Trafalgar”

 9:45    Cindy Campbell-Stone, “The Lady In the Lighthouse: The Catherine GallagherStory”

10:30   Coffee and Danish

10:45   Robert D. Madison, “The Other Little Nell”

11:30   Stephen N. Sanfilippo, “Chanteys and Masculinity in the Works of Dana, Melville, London, and O’Neill”

12:15   Lunch (can be purchased at Mort's Cafe in the UConn Avery Point Student Center)

 1:45    David Peloquin, “Ahab’s Tear; Melville’s Mystic Heart”

 2:30    Soft drinks and cookies

 2:45    David Webber and Anni Fentiman, “Of Whales and Men”

Please join us at Mystic Seaport following the Friday Symposium for a
Special Presentation by the "Barrouallie Whalers"

“Hawthorne in the Berkshires”

Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Summer Meeting
June 12-15, 2014
North Adams, Massachusetts

Hosted by Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Reconstruction of Hawthorne's "Little Red Farmhouse" at Tanglewood

In 1850 Hawthorne moved his family to Lenox, where for almost two years he produced a range of literary work: The House of the Seven Gables and a new edition of Twice-ToldTales,as well as The Snow Image and Other Twice-told Tales, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, and other works for children. Related to this productivity were his new friendships with Herman Melville in nearby Pittsfield and Catharine Sedgwick, Grace Greenwood, and other women who were part of that “d----d mob of scribbling women.” The scenic region, which had become a summer playground for the very rich, also brought him into contact with Shakers, artists, mill owners and workers, and church-goers of all persuasions—contradictory personalities and forces which also impacted his later works. In Lenox, the Hawthornes learned of Margaret Fuller’s death with its accompanying questions about a woman’s professional role and domestic arrangements. In a nutshell, there were dizzying contradictions in Hawthorne’s observations and associations while he was in Lenox.

Melville's "Piazza" below his study at his farmhouse in Pittsfield

2014 Emily Dickinson Institute

Amherst, Massachusetts

Friday, August 8th, 2014

On Friday, August 8th, 2014, the EDIS "Dickinson Institute" will be held in Amherst, Massachusetts. The topic is "Emily Dickinson and New England Writers." Members will meet at the Institute with this group to discuss their work in detail. The Institute will also involve a plenary speaker and a gathering of all Institute members at its close to reflect on their work and the larger themes of the conference. The Institute is scheduled for the first day of the Emily Dickinson Annual Meeting, which all participants are welcome to attend.

For more information visit the Emily Dickinson International Society website.

MLA 2015 Melville Panels

Vancouver, BC
8-11 January 2015

Melville and Comparative Racialization

Building on scholarship that has examined Melville's treatments of African Americans, Pacific islanders, Native Americans, Persians, and other racialized subjects, this panel will focus on the implicit and explicit comparisons that Melville drew between racial groups. What forms the basis for cross-racial analogies, distinctions, hybridizations, and comparisons, and how do these change our understanding of Melville's thinking about race? Are Melville's cross-racial comparisons affected by other social conditions such as colonialism, class, gender, sexuality, and disability?

“After the Eruption”: Melville and the Cultural
Memory of the American Civil War

In response to the 2015 MLA Presidential Theme, “Negotiating Sites of Memory,” the Melville Society presents a special session, “‘After the Eruption’: Melville and the Cultural Memory of the American Civil War.”

 Ahab's Dream - Art Exhibit
Peter Martin - Artist
New Bedford Whaling Museum
January - June, 2014

Peter Martin with Ahab's Dream
click to enlarge

Peter Martin, whose art work is being added to the New Bedford Whaling Museum archive this year, will be exhibiting a show of Moby-Dick paper cuts at the Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum from January to June, 2014. Concerning this exhibit of large scale paper and fiber cuttings inspired by Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Peter shares that he feels that it best represents his journey as an artist. See our Event Calendar for more details.

Melville the Man
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New Moby-Dick Opera

by Eugeniusz Knapik

Polish National Opera - Teatr Wielki

Eugeniusz Knapik is working on a new Moby-Dick opera whose debut is expected to be one of the most important operatic events in Poland. Indeed, in the words of Melville scholar, Paweł Jędrzejko, its opening will likely prove to be one of the major opera events in not only Poland, but all of Europe.

The links below should be helpful to anyone interested in following the opera as it makes its way to the Polish National Opera stage in Warsaw, Poland.

Eugeniusz Knapik on Wikipedia

Teatr Wielki (Grand Theatre) - Polish National Opera

Eugeniusz Knapik Biography - Katowice Academy of Music

Eugeniusz Knapik, born in Ruda Śląska in 1951, is a pianist, classical composer and university teacher. He