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

  Now Available

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

Vol. 20 – No. 2

Click image to visit the Leviathan website

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, volume 20, issue 2, is now available through Project Muse at http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38709, and dues-paying members of The Melville Society can expect copies in the mail in the next month. The issue contains a cluster of essays on digital approaches to Melville’s marginalia in Shakespeare, Milton, and Home, guest-edited by Steven Olsen-Smith and Christopher Ohge of Melville’s Marginalia Online and including contributions from Peter Norberg and Tony McGowan as well as the guest editors. Notably, these pieces also have multiple student co-contributors. The issue also includes pieces from Warren Broderick on Melville and a “young Scotch Artist” and John Gretchko on Melville’s will and three reviews: Joel Pfister on Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein’s Norton Critical Edition of Pierre; Jennifer Greiman on Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans’s collection Melville’s Philosophies; and Christopher Phillips on Brian Yothers’s Sacred Uncertainty. “All Astir,” a Bezanson Archive Fellowship Report from Meaghan Fritz, and MLA 2018 abstracts round out the issue. For information on subscribing to Leviathan, see https://www.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/order.cgi?oc_id=2102

Happy reading! ​

Membership in the Melville Society includes a Leviathan subscription.
Click here for information about Society membership.

2019 Modern Language Association Conference

Chicago

In addition to Rodrigo Lazo's panel, "Reading The Confidence-Man Today," Kim Evans' panel on "Melville’s Quarrel with Modernity" was accepted. While it's not directly a Society event John Matteson and Edlie Wong's "American Lives: Whitman and Melville" was also accepted. We'll be hosting our first cash bar! It should be a nice bridge between our panels and our dinner… and an opportunity to do something special for the bicentennial. Scheduling information will be posted soon.

Call for Papers - 12th International Conference - Melville's Bicentennial

Melville's Origins

New York University
New York, NY

June 17-20, 2019

(download link to CFP located below)

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.

• Papers might focus on Melville’s works in relation to the terms "origins" and "original" as they were understood in various nineteenth-century discourses: for example, political and ethnological debates about national origins, racial lineage, or indigeneity; philosophical formulations of an essential or “aboriginal” self (to use Emerson’s phrase); scientific theories about the genesis of the cosmos, life-forms, and new species; proto-anthropological conversations about human origins, the origins of language, and the role of animals as intercessors between humankind and a primeval past; theological debates over “original sin” and human depravity; proto-psychological theories about the roots of morality, sexual desire, mental faculties, and personality traits.

• “Originality” is also a hallmark of the Romantic artist, and papers might explore Melville’s attitudes regarding this aesthetic. What do we make of Melville’s claim that “it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation,” especially in light of his own penchant for borrowing from other writers? Papers might explore Melville’s views of intellectual property and the publishing industry, his thinking about “original characters” in fiction, or his varied responses to Evert Duyckinck and Young America’s call for an original American literature. Likewise, papers might examine the importance assigned to artistic originality in popular and scholarly assessments of Melville’s writing.

• We also encourage papers that deploy “origins” as a key term for current theoretical approaches to Melville’s works. As a designation of both temporal and spatial starting points, the concept of origins might help us think about the commencement of narrative (“Call me Ishmael”) or the commencement of movement within an imagined geography—both of which might also be visualized through digital mapping. Scholars engaged in textual historiography, history of the book, or manuscript editing might discuss the problems of discerning an original text from the multiple versions and editions of Melville's works as well as explore the possibilities of using digital technology to present textual variants.

• We hope papers will use this anniversary to reflect on the nineteenth-century response to Melville’s works and on the origins and development of Melville Studies since its inception a century ago, to assess the current state of the field, and to think speculatively about new directions for scholarship and teaching. What new insights might be gleaned from revisiting Melville's origins in New York City—a beacon for global migration and a center of arts and letters—as well as the myriad materials from which he derived ideas and inspiration?

• Scholarship has often worked in tandem with creative responses to Melville by artists of various media, and accordingly, we also invite papers that think about the role of Melville-inspired contemporary art in opening new avenues of interpretation. How do such artistic appropriations suggest the relationship of an adaptation to its original, and how are Melville’s works transformed by such borrowings, filmic, fictional, artistic, and otherwise?

In addition to submissions for traditional panels and individual papers, proposals for roundtables, workshops, and sessions using new presentation formats are particularly welcome. We also seek proposals from independent scholars, creative artists, and academic scholars of diverse institutional affiliation, academic rank, and disciplinary background. 

Please submit proposals by October 1, 2018 to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Paper proposals should not exceed 300 words, and panel proposals should not exceed 1000 words. In the subject line please use the format [“proposal type, surname,” e.g. “Paper, Smith”] and name the file using the format [“surname, first name,” e.g. “Smith, John”]. Please direct any questions to Jennifer Baker at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Tony McGowan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or John Matteson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Files:

12th International Conference - Call for PapersHOT

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Call for Essays – Special Bicentennial Issues of Leviathan
"Melville at 200"

Deadline September 1, 2018

“Mer Pacifique.” 1776. Historic Maps Collection, Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

"And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher."

Chapter 99 of Moby-Dick, “The Doubloon”

The year 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. For special issues of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies to be published in the bicentennial year, the journal’s editors invite submissions on any aspect of Melville’s work, life, times, and reception. We welcome submissions, critical or creative, that advance our understanding of the “certain significance” of Melville at the present moment, 200 years after his birth and 100 years after the biographical and critical “Melville Revival.”

Contributions might approach Melville from any number of methodological and theoretical perspectives and foreground any number of issues, including politics, religion, the arts, aesthetics, biography, textuality, digital humanities, US and world literatures, and global reception. How does Melville continue to speak, as C. L. R. James phrased it, to the “world we live in”?

All submissions should be made through the journal’s electronic editorial site, which can be accessed here. New users will need to create an account. Guidelines for submission, including the journal’s style sheet, can be found here. To be considered for inclusion in the anniversary year issues, submissions need to be uploaded to Leviathan’s electronic editorial site no later than September 1, 2018, and “Melville at 200” should be mentioned in the cover letter. Please address any questions to the journal’s Editor, Samuel Otter, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Click the link below to download a PDF of the Call for Essays.

Leviathan Bicentennial Issue - Calls for EssaysHOT

 2018-01-16

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NEH Summer Institute for Teachers
The New Bedford Whaling Museum
Summer 2018

Application Deadline is March 1, 2018

Amount of stipend varies according to weeks of participation:
one week ($1,200), two weeks  ($2,100), three weeks ($2,700), or four weeks ($3,300).

Click the image below for application instructions.

Tim Marr has announced that the Melville Society Cultural Project's collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum has been awarded funding for a NEH Summer Institute for School Teachers that will take place at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts from June 17-30, 2018.

You can use the links at the end of this article to download for distribution the flyer and full press release. Here are some excerpts from the press release: 

The New Bedford Whaling Museum, in association with Melville Society Cultural Project, has been awarded a $136,342 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant will fund a two-week Summer Institute for Teachers in 2018, which will illuminate the art and context of Herman Melville’s famous 19th century American novel Moby-Dick, and help teachers from across the country interpret the book for 21st century students.

Six nationally recognized scholars make up the Melville Society Cultural Project, aimed at sharing an understanding of Herman Melville’s writings, life, and times. They will serve as principal faculty of the Institute: Jennifer Baker, New York University; Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, University of Connecticut; Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Chris Sten, George Washington University; Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University; and Timothy Marr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, serving as the Institute Director.

“The Melville Society Cultural Project is delighted to partner with the Whaling Museum to bring teachers from around the country to New Bedford, the historical center of American whaling,” said Tim Marr, Director of the Summer Institute for Teachers. “From there we will journey forth together on Melville’s Pequod in quest of Moby-Dick, a text that swims on and is crucially relevant for understanding our human dilemmas in the 21st century.”

The Institute will be hosted at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. New Bedford, Massachusetts is a meaningful location for intensive study of Herman Melville’s masterpiece in the context of the whaling industry. Melville arrived in New Bedford on Christmas day 1840 and shipped nine days later on the Acushnet from Fairhaven across the harbor. Since 2000, the Whaling Museum has partnered with the Melville Society Cultural Project to offer scholarly programming, and the Museum is home to the Melville Society Archive, which constitutes one of the best collections of Melville scholarship anywhere in the world.

Click below for printable flyer.

NBWM Summer Institute 2018 FlyerHOT

 2018-01-21

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Click below for press release.

NEH 2018 Summer Institute NBWMHOT

 

 2017-08-16

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A Call for Book Proposals

From Richard King of the University Press of New England

http://www.upne.com/series/SEA.html

The University Press of New England and the Williams College-Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program seek book proposals for our “Seafaring America” series.

We are looking for works in three categories:

1. Suggestions for timely reissues of forgotten, out-of-print American works of literary and cultural distinction, with new introductions that frame the work for a modern audience.
2. Proposals for anthologies and/or selected editions of writers’ work.
3. Proposals for books of original scholarship or of general interest, according to the series mission below.

We have particular interest in underrepresented voices and “blue” environmental studies.

_______________________

“Seafaring America” is a series of original and classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama exploring the history of America’s engagement with our oceans and coastlines. Spanning diverse eras, populations, and geographical settings, the series strives to introduce, revive, and aggregate a wide range of exemplary and/or seminal stories about our American maritime heritage. This includes the accounts of First Peoples, explorers, voluntary and forced immigrants, women in maritime communities, fishermen, whalers, captains, common sailors, members of the navy and coast guard, marine biologists and oceanographers, and the crews of vessels ranging from lifeboats, riverboats, and tugboats to recreational yachts. “Seafaring America” introduces new stories of maritime interest and reprints books that have fallen out of circulation and deserve reappraisal. The series also publishes selections from well-known works that warrant reconsideration because of the lessons they offer about our relationship with our watery planet.

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.