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.

Drawings, Paintings, and Sculpture by Mark Milloff

September 22, 2013 – January 5, 2014

Lyman Allyn Art Museum - New London, CT

From the museum's website:

Milloff’s Melville features 25 years of Mark Milloff’s drawings, paintings, and sculpture inspired by Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick.  A professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Milloff has long been immersed in narratives of the sea. Growing up a stone’s throw from what he describes as “the murky canals and mangrove mudflats” of South Florida, Milloff developed an insatiable curiosity about creatures of the sea. That interest eventually provoked his obsession with Moby Dick, which became a potent resource for expressing his own state of mind, as well as plumbing the American imagination past and present. For more information visit the museum's website at http://www.lymanallyn.org/milloffs-melville/

In addition, Barbara Zabe, curator of the Millhoff exhibit, is giving a lecture on Thursday, November 21st, at 6 pm at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum. For information follow this link: http://www.lymanallyn.org/category/events/lectures-and-presentations/

38^th Voyagers -- Announcement of Call for Proposals

Go to sea on a 19th-century whaleship, then tell your tale to the world…

                Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea seeks volunteers to participate in an exciting, unprecedented public-history project onboard the former whaleship Charles W. Morgan. Beginning Dec. 1, 2013, the Museum will accept project proposals by talented, self-motivated adults from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to document and share their experiences during the ship’s commemorative 38^th Voyage.

                In Summer 2014 the Charles W. Morgan will sail for the first time in more than 80 years. During its first 37 voyages (1841-1921), this vessel ventured into all the world’s oceans in pursuit of whale oil and baleen, carrying multi-ethnic crews and coming into contact with many different cultures. Now a National Historic Landmark, the Morgan will sail to seven New England ports, engaging communities with their maritime heritage, raising awareness of the changing perceptions about whales, and furthering ongoing research into whales, whaling, and whaling peoples.

Call for Papers

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.

This panel seeks to address the continuous and discontinuous elements of Melville’s poetry and of his career as a poet. What are the threads of repetition, similarity, and consistency that persist in his poetry and in his authorial practices? What are the most revealing and illustrative of his discontinuities? How might his discontinuities ironically help us generate useful narratives of his poetic career?

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to Matthew Giordano at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Please indicate any A/V needs you might have for your presentation.

The deadline for abstract submission is January 15, 2014.

Melville and the Politics of Print

Papers invited on any aspect of Melville’s work as it relates to book history or the history of periodicals.  Issues to be addressed might include: copyright, serialization, illustrations, editing Melville, Melville in/and libraries, adaptations of Melville’s work to non-print media such as film or radio, digital Melville, Melville in the archive, the Melville revival, literary celebrity.   How can a focus on practices of writing, printing, and reading from the nineteenth century to the present generate new insights into Melville’s work?

Submit 250-word abstract and a brief c.v. to Anne Baker This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Jan. 15, 2014.

Call for Papers

C19 Conference 2014

Deadline September 13, 2013

Melville in Common: History, Politics, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and C19 Studies

The Melville Society seeks participants for a panel to be proposed for the 2014 C19 Conference, “Commons”

From the unanimity of opinion among the Typee that unnerves Melville’s Tommo, to the vivid images of laboring in common in Moby-Dick, to the strange affective states that nevertheless disclose a set of common feelings in virtually all of Melville’s writing, it almost goes without saying that Melville thought consistently and rigorously about the promises and limits of the common over the four decades of his career as a writer. Rather less consistently and rigorously addressed, perhaps, are questions of how, why, and in what ways nineteenthcentury Americanists have Melville in common. For a writer who seemed to have little in common with his contemporaries, Melville continues to be a crucial common denominator for those who study the 19th century and beyond, decades after demands for canon expansion have pluralized the field beyond author-centered approaches. Contemporary work on Melville represents an astonishing variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, as Melville stands as exemplary of 19th-century legal history, critiques of capital, accounts of poverty and race, democratic culture, philosophy, form, aesthetics, science, and so on. Moreover, Melville’s work – “Bartleby,” in particular – now seems essential for theorists thinking through the specific question of what does and does not count as the common.

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

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.

Featured Photo Albums - MLA Seattle 2012 - January 5-8