SUPPORT THE MELVILLE SOCIETY

As you know, your annual dues provide you with a subscription to our award-winning journal Leviathan. What you may not know is that the Society also supports biennial international conferences and numerous outreach programs. In recent decades, The Melville Society has grown in size, diversity, and scope, and it now exceeds the boundaries of the typical single author society. Unfortunately, dues alone do not support our publications, conferences, and outreach, and the Melville Society must now ask for your additional financial support.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Melville Society, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

You may contribute now to help establish a new Bicentennial Fund endowment in support of the range of the Society’s programs and activities, or you may contribute to the Henry Murray Endowment, which supports Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and other Society publications.

For a complete list of the programs to which you can make tax-deductible donations visit our Funds and Endowments page, Checks should be made payable to the Melville Society, with the name of the fund earmarked for donation specified in the memo line of the check. Mail your checks to the Melville Society treasurer, Zach Hutchins, at

The Melville Society
c/o Dr. Zach Hutchins, Treasurer
1562 Windcreek Court
Fort Collins, CO 80526

Announcements

CFP for MLA 2022 in Washington DC - Two Panels
"Embrace All Aliens”: Melville and Migration and "Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity"

There are two Calls for Papers for the two panels that the Melville Socity is sponsoring at the 2022 Modern Language Association Conference in Washington DC: "Embrace All Aliens”: Melville and Migration and "Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity". Click here to read the full text for both Calls for Papers.

Announcing This Year's Hennig Cohen Prize Winner

Kellen T. Bolt for “Squeezing Sperm: Nativism, Queer Contact, and
the Futures of Democratic Intimacy in Moby-Dick” 

The Melville Society is pleased to announce that the 2019 Hennig Cohen Prize has been awarded to Kellen T. Bolt, for his article, “Squeezing Sperm: Nativism, Queer Contact, and the Futures of Democratic Intimacy in Moby-Dick,” which was published in ESQ in October 2019. This prize honors the memory of Hennig Cohen with an annual award for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville. The award is typically made in the year after the article or chapter was published, and because of the pandemic, we were slightly delayed in making this announcement. 

Click here to read more about Bolt's work and review an annotated list of previous Cohen Prize winners.

Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

Volume 22, Number 3 -  October 2020

click image to enlarge

Leviathan 22.3 is now available on Project Muse!

The issue includes essays by Nathan Wolff on Billy Budd and politics, Robin Miskolcze on Moby-Dick and contemporary documentary, Jonathan A. Cook on Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires, Johan Warodell on animal species in Melville’s fiction, and Dasha Sirotinskaya (Kuzina) on translating Mardi into Russian. It also features a poem by Taylor Centers on the Melvilles’ graves, book reviews of Geoffrey Sanborn’s The Value of Herman Melville by Elisa Tamarkin, Elizabeth Renker’s Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900 by Martin Griffin, Natasha Hurley’s Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Jessica Floyd, and in Dawn Coleman’s Books in Brief section, Elizabeth Freeman’s Beside You in Time, John Arcudi’s From Hell’s Heart, and Brian Yothers’s Broadview Edition of “Benito Cereno.” In Extracts, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’s All Astir column highlights virtual encounters with Melville during the pandemic. Gordon M. Poole examines Luc-François Granier's Dreams of Moby-Dick, and Ashley Gangi offers a new source for The Confidence-Man while Mark Howard provides new information about and an image of James German, who inspired a character in Omoo.

Click this link to see Leviathan 22.3 on Project Muse!

For information about subscribing to Leviathan, click here.

Leviathan Celebrates Melville at 200

The John Hopkins University Press Blog features an interview with
Samuel Otter and Brian Yothers discussing the Melville Bicentennial
and the four Leviathan issues devoted to its celebration

click the image to read the interview

Eleen Lin, The Spirit Spout, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 in.

Robert  K. Wallace has shared his illustrated blog essays covering all five days of the recent 12th International Melville Society Conference held in New York celebrating Melville's Bicentennial. To read the essays, you can click here or click the "Blogs" link above in the main menu. Thank you Professor Wallace!

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 2019 New York Conference on Flickr

Thanks to the photographers and participants in 12th International Conference in New York last June
for sharing their memories and photos. .

Click here or on the photo below to view the New York album in the Melville Society Flickr gallery