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.

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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The Tenth International Melville Conference 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.

Registration and Logistical Information

Conference attendees should check to see if their home countries require visas to visit Japan.
(U.S. citizens do not need a visa to visit Japan)
A guide to Japanese Visas (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) is here.

For full registration, travel, lodging, and event information,
please click the link below:

http://peatix.com/event/61390

ALA Sponsored Symposium

"God and the American Writer"

February 26-28, 2015
Sheraton Gunter Hotel
San Antonio, Texas

The symposium will be held at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, on February 26-28, 2015.  The deadline for paper proposals is December 1st.  All proposals should be sent to Jeanne Reesman at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.<mailto:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>.

Aside from great panels with great papers, the symposium will also feature two keynote addresses, one by Harold K. Bush on Mark Twain and one by Jonathan Cook on Herman Melville.  There will also be a poetry reading with the theme of women and spirituality featuring Bonnie Lyons, poet and critic, and Enedina Vasquez, poet, artist, and lay Episcopal minister. 

In addition, there will be a screening of Terence Malik's film "The Tree of Life" with an informance by Stacey Peebles.  There will be a mariachi reception and luncheons and a tour of local historic missions and the San Fernando Cathedral.

2 Calls for Papers

American Literature Association

21-24 May 2015
Boston, MA

CFP Panel 1: Melville's Money

This panel seeks proposals for papers exploring the status of money, broadly conceived, in and across Herman Melville’s works. All approaches welcome, from (to name just a few) biographical accounts of “dollars damn[ing]” Melville, to historicist work with Melville and industrial capitalism, to new formalist accounts of his textual economies, to transtemporal and/or transnational reception studies of Melville and his works as symbolic currency (Melville as money). Please email one-page CVs and 250-500 word abstracts by 20 December 2014 to Andrew Kopec at address listed below:

Email proposal for "Melville's Money" to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

CFP Panel 2: Melville's Relations

Proposals sought for papers exploring the forms and structures of relation, broadly conceived, in and across Herman Melville's works. Please email 300 word abstracts by 15 December 2014 to Elizabeth Duquette at address listed below. 

Email proposal for "Melville's Relations" to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Moby-Dick Exhibition Marathon, and Symposium in Northern Kentucky
Various Locations  - See Schedule
April 24-27, 2015

Artwork © Kathleen Piercefield, Moby-Dick: a mighty mildness, 2009
(click to see a larger image)

We are planning the following events from April 24 - 27 to highlight the exhibition Moby Comes to Covington: Twenty Years of Moby-Dick Art by Students at Northern Kentucky University at the Kenton County Public Library at 500 Scott Street in Covington, KY.  Curated by NKU English Professor Robert K. Wallace and BFA Art History major Emma Rose Thompson, the exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalog entitled Fast-Fish & Loose Fish: Twenty-Years of Moby-Dick Art by Students at Northern Kentucky University, reproducing 103 artworks by 53 students beginning in 1994.

Friday, April 24, KICK-OFF EVENT—panel discussion on MOBY-DICK in the 21st CENTURY at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio., 6:30 pm.  Speakers include Elizabeth Schultz, Samuel Otter, Matt Kish, Emma Rose Thompson, and Evans Mirageas (artistic director of Cincinnati Opera), moderated by Robert K. Wallace.

Saturday, April 25, and Sunday, April 26, MARATHON READING OF MOBY-DICK in the exhibition space at the Kenton County Public Library, 9 am to 9 pm each day. 

Monday, April 27, SYMPOSIUM ON MOBY-DICK AND VISUAL ART and CAMPUS TOUR OF MOBY-DICK ART, Budig Theater, University Center, Northern Kentucky University, 9 a.m. to 5 p. m.  Speakers will include Elizabeth Schultz (keynote); Matt Kish and Kathleen Piercefield (creative artist session); Jeffrey Markham (pedagogical session); Samuel Otter, (closing remarks), and NKU students and alums whose artworks are in the exhibition and its catalog.

Mon. April 27, RECEPTION honoring STUDENT ARTISTS and SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS, in the exhibition space at Kenton County Public Library in Covington, 5:30 to 7 pm.

Additional information available from Professor Wallace at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  Updated details about these events will be provided on the home page of his blog DICKINSON AND MOBY-DICK IN 2015 at http://dickinsonandmobydick.wordpress.com

Call for Papers
 
MLA 2016 - Austin, TX

Melville's Late Fiction, or Radical Inhabitation 

This panel will ask how Melville's late fictions (Moby-Dick and after) recast natural histories of the Americas; and in the process, complicate our understanding of the political and challenge assumptions of the gothic, the ghostly, the human and non-human. Topics include: the nature of things and persons; the problem of faith and/or re-making of a spirituality that has little to do with piety or moralism and everything to do with sensation—along with the instinct or affections that stimulate it--and the unexpected prose that results when the care of craft joins with the demands of ethical attention. Please send abstract and brief cv to Colin Dayan: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Special Notice & Invitation

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

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to open in a new tab or window.

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.

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