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.

Events and Announcements

Call for Papers for ALA 2019

May 23-26 2019

Boston

Unsettling Feeling: Melville's Emotions

Talk of Melville and "emotion" may call to mind Moby-Dick's affective extremes: Ahab's monomaniacal fury and the egalitarian exuberance of the crew. But in recent years critics have begun to excavate a range of less focused, recognizable, or stable feelings, which permeate Melville's oeuvre. Sianne Ngai analyzes The Confidence Man's circulation of "fake feeling" and its ambiguous, unstable atonality; Jennifer Greiman has described "misgivings" in Battle-Pieces as a productive "mood of suspension"; and Michael Jonik troubles our visions of squeeze-of-the-hand camaraderie by tracing the "sensation of misanthropy." What other unexpected, in-between, unsettled—or unsettling—feelings might we recover in Melville's texts?

Related questions to consider: How do we understand the political effects of Melville's affects? What linkages might we trace between feelings associated with characters within the diegesis and the "tone" or "mood" of the texts themselves? How can we put Melvillean emotion in dialogue with ongoing debates within literary studies about our field's critical dispositions (e.g. suspicion, distance, enchantment) and emotional investments?

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by January 11th, 2019.

Melville and Women, Revisited

2019 marks the 200th year since Melville’s birth and has inspired varied observances of this anniversary. It also marks 25 years since the first Melville Society panel on Melville and women at ALA. This panel returns to gender theory and scholarship, inviting fresh considerations of women as shapers of culture and the arts, voices of protest and reform, and pioneers in fluid conceptions of gender and identity. How do these contexts influence our understanding of women who inhabit Melville’s pages and with whom he lived, worked, corresponded, and met the challenges of 19th-century life and writing? What do we make of unconventional characters like Isabel Banford, Agatha Hatch, Hunilla, or Goneril? What of his queens—Pomaree, Hautia, and “queenly” Ahab? How do 21st-century understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and identity help us frame these presences in Melville’s work?

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by January 11th, 2019.

12th International Conference - Melville's Bicentennial

Melville's Origins

New York University
New York, NY

June 17-20, 2019

(click here for the official conference website) 

The Twelfth International Melville Society Conference will take place at New York University to celebrate the bicentennial of Herman Melville's birth in lower Manhattan in 1819. The conference will commemorate Melville's life, work, and legacies through a series of papers and conversations devoted to the theme of “origins” broadly conceived. We invite proposals for individual papers or panels organized around MELVILLE’S ORIGINS as it relates to historicist, theoretical, textual, biographical, and pedagogical approaches to Melville’s writings and to the history of their reception in criticism, adaptation, the digital world, popular culture, and the fine arts.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers will be Rodrigo Lazo, Professor of English at UC-Irvine, and Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT. In addition to the regular panels and roundtables at New York University, there will be a number of special events and Melville-related excursions around New York City. We are also planning an optional post-conference daytrip to Mystic, CT, to tour the historic seaport and see the 1841 whale ship, Charles W. Morgan, on Friday, June 21.

For those traveling to New York City, we are working to procure reasonably priced suites in a residence hall on campus. More details will be available at our conference website, www.melville2019.weebly.com, scheduled to go live the last week of September.

Please direct any questions to Jennifer Baker at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Tony McGowan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Now Available

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

Vol. 20 – No. 3

The October 2018 issue of Leviathan (vol. 20, no. 3) is now available on Project Muse! Dues-paying members of The Melville Society who subscribe to the print edition should receive their copies in the mail soon. The issue features a special section on Israel Potter edited and introduced by Robert S. Levine and including essays by Carol Colatrella, Emilio Irigoyen, Jeffrey Insko, Emilia Le Seven, and Ryan McWilliams. It also includes a note on Seneca in Moby-Dick by James Zainaldin; a note on Melville family properties by Warren Broderick; an essay on Melville’s Prints in the Osborne Collection by Robert K. Wallace; Wyn Kelley’s review of Visionary of the Word, edited by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers; Donald Pease’s review of Waging War on War, by Giorgio Mariani; Dawn Coleman’s survey of recent publications connected to Melville studies in “Books in Brief”; and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’s “All Astir” and the abstracts from Melville panels at the most recent American Literature Association Conference in the Extracts section. Click the following link  http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/39249​ to access the Leviathan Project Muse page. For information about subscribing to Leviathan, click here.

Call for Papers
Melville Conference
"Over Seas: Melville, Whitman and All the Intrepid Sailors"

University of Lisbon - Center for English Studies
July, 3 – 5, 2019

Deadline for abstracts: March 11, 2019
Notification of acceptance: March 30, 2019

(Click below to download a PDF of the CFP)

The American Studies Research Group at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies) is organizing an international conference and exhibition, “Over Seas: Melville, Whitman and All the Intrepid Sailors,” to mark the bicentenaries of the births of two of America’s most powerful literary voices: Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

The conference will take place in Lisbon from 3rd to 5th July, 2019. Deadline for submission of abstracts is March 11, 2019.

They invite submissions of abstracts for panel sessions (up to 1000 words), roundtables, papers and posters (up to 300 words) to be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., with the following information:

. full title of paper, panel or poster;
. full name of author;
. institutional affiliation;
. individual e-mail address(es);
. brief bio (max. 5 lines).

For more information, contact Cecilia Beecher Martins at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Files:

CFP: Over Seas: Melville, Whitman and All the Intrepid Sailors

 2018-10-19

 217.81 KB

 69

Download

CALL FOR PAPERS

Melville Conference
Co-hosted by the University of Lille and Paris-Diderot University (France)
October 17-18, 2019

DEADLINE FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: February, 1st, 2019.

Melville's Measures

"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.

Ahab’s exclamation notwithstanding, Moby-Dick more readily calls to mind the longing for the “unshored, haborless immensities” (ch. 32), “indefinite as God” (ch. 23), than down-to-earth measures taken to apprehend or comprehend “the ungraspable phantom of life” (ch. 1). Significantly enough, “if money’s to be the measurer,” Ahab’s doubloon is an ambivalent gold standard, at once the symbol of rampant capitalism that has transformed the world into a “great counting-house,” the effigy of Ahab’s sovereign self and a figure for Ishmael’s continual forging of symbols of his own coinage. Even as it bears the stamp of Ahab’s empire, the gold coin remains a source of numberless speculations for Ishmael. “The measure” is rife with ambiguities.

Call for Papers

The 12th Biennial Symbiosis Conference

11-14 July 2019, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK

Deadline for proposals: 30 January 2019.

https://www.dundee.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/

https://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com/

The 12th Biennial Symbiosis Conference will take place at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 11-14 July 2019. As ever, we welcome paper and panel proposals on all areas of Transatlantic literary exchange. 

Please send proposals to Dr. Aliki Varvogli (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), using ‘Symbiosis 2019’ as your subject.

Deadline for proposals: 30 January 2019.

In addition to the general call for papers, there will be three special themes:

• Transatlantic Bicentennials (George Eliot and Herman Melville amongst others)
• Transatlantic Detective Fiction
• Transatlantic Comics

Dundee in the spotlight:

Dundee is one of the great powerhouses of comics production, not just in the UK, but internationally. The publisher DC Thomson is at the heart of the city, and many of the top comics creators in Britain began their careers with the company or have been inspired by Dundee’s comics. It is therefore fitting that Dundee hosts annual events that celebrate this legacy, and that the University of Dundee offers courses in Comics Studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The University of Dundee is a world leader in Anatomy and Human Identification and hosts the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science. Harnessing this scientific expertise, Dundee now offers a Masters in Creative Writing: Crime Fiction and Forensic Investigation. Scotland has a flourishing crime writing scene with several crime festivals in stunning historic locations celebrating the ‘tartan noir’ phenomenon.

Located on the east coast, Dundee is Scotland’s sunniest city, and one of the easiest to get to. It has a regional airport, but Edinburgh and Glasgow airports are also conveniently close. 90% of Scotland is within 90 minutes’ drive, with famous castles, lochs and golf courses easy to visit even for a daytrip.

Visit Our Media Pages

Featuring Videos from Our International Conferences and a Poetry Reading by Gordon Poole

Tim Marr reading from Clarel at Mar Saba

Gordon Poole reading "In a Bye-Canal," a poem from the "Fruit of Travel Long Ago" section of  Timoleon

Neapolitan Folk Songs and Dances at the Eighth International Melville Conference, Rome, June 2011.

Photo Gallery of the June 2017 London Conference on Flickr

Thanks to the photographers and participants in 11th International Conference in London last June
for sharing their memories and photos. 

Click in the menu above to view the "Photos" page for a gallery of photos from the London 2017 conference.

Or click here or on the photo below to view the London 2017 album in the Melville Society Flickr gallery

Colin Dewey giving closing remarks
Balliol College, Oxford.