Home Conferences MLA Conference MLA 2017 - Two Panels - 2 Calls for Papers

The Eaton Portrait

Eaton portrait of Herman Melville
By permission of Houghton Library
Harvard University: 61Z-4
(Click to view a larger image)

Leviathan

whale-trp200Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies appears three times a year in March, June, and October. We welcome articles, notes, reviews, and creative writing on the life, works, and influence of novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891). Click here for more information.

Melville Electronic Library

mel-thumb-crpd-3The Melville Electronic Library is an online resource for Melville texts. Housed on a Hofstra University server, MEL is being developed and maintained by a group of Melville scholars and digital specialists.

Johns Hopkins University Press

jhup-logoTo join the Melvillle Society and subscribe to Leviathan, visit Leviathan's Johns Hopkins University Press journal site by clicking here.

Melville Society Cultural Project

Melville Society and New Bedford Whaling Museum Cultural Project The New Bedford Whaling Museum in collaboration with The Melville Society is the established home of the Melville Society Cultural Project and Melville Society Archive. The Melville Society Archive is housed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum's Research Library, where significant works from this collection are also on display. The Melville Society Cultural Project also sponsors a book donation program and presents exciting annual events including the Moby-Dick Marathon and a Birthday Lecture.

Melville Society MLA 2017 - 2 Panels - 2 CFPs
Two Panels - 2 Calls for Papers: Modern Language Association
Philadelphia January 5-8 2017

 

1st CFP

Melville's Taxonomies

The panel will look into how Melville's works from Mardi on problematize categorial divides, confusing living and non-living, persons and things, prophetic and rational, sacred and profane. Sometimes they do that by turning terrestrial landscapes, oceanic milieus and vegetal life into agencies that revise what counts as a person and what constitutes the experience of suffering. In other instances obscurity concerning what or who counts as living is maintained by rendering humans as beings that are passive to the point of becoming inanimate, or by dignifying what is low and material and demoting what is divine. Topics: persons and things, taxonomies of the human; biological politics, vitalism, vegetal and animal life, extinction.

Please send CV and 250 word abstract to Branka Arsic (ba2406ATcolumbia.edu)  by March 1, 2016. Please substitute @ for the AT being used to block spambots.

 

2nd CFP

Melville and Black Lives Matter

This panel seeks papers that address how Melville's art both speaks to racial crises and mediates philosophical dilemmas, political unrest, concepts of history etc. Black writers (Ralph Ellison, C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, David Bradley, and more) turned to Melville's literary forms and provocative content to engage historical and political transformation in the Americas. What is it in Melville's aporias, assemblages, and abstractions that we can continue to excavate for its relevance to social conflict—especially conflict where racial/ethnic/queer difference is performed, expressed, and/or represented? Topics may include but are certainly not limited to: attention to interventions by one or more of the black writers mentioned above; racial violence; police brutality; prison reform/abolition; the rise/fall imperial states; totalitarianism; race and neoliberalism; New World Slavery; inequality in Latin America; US/Middle East turmoil.

Please send 250 word abstract and short bio to Chris Freeburg: ccfreeburgATgmail.com by March 15 2016. Please substitute @ for the AT being used to block spambots.

 

Current Facebook Posts

Greg Lennes Today in Melvillean history: On August the 19th 1819, Melville is baptized at home by J. M. Mathews, a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church in New York City.
2017-08-19T16:03:18+0000
Greg Lennes Melvillean Solar Eclipse: From Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) - 3.5.60-65 "This change, this dusking change that slips (Like the penumbra o'er the sun), Over the faith transmitted down; Foreshadows it complete eclipse?" Footnote: "The "penumbra" is the Earth's shadow that falls upon the moon during a lunar eclipse, but Melville here is applying the term to a solar eclipse." (From "Herman Melville: Stargazer" By Brett Zimmerman) The first photo of a total solar eclipse, shown here, was a daguerreotype by the Prussian photographer Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. (July 28, 1851 - same year that Moby-Dick was published) :)
img.purch.com img.purch.com
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Greg Lennes Review: The Eleventh International Melville Society Conference (June 27 - June 30, 2017) by Hannah Murray.
Review: The Eleventh International Melville Society ConferenceKings College London baas.ac.uk Organised around the focus of ‘Melville’s crossings’, the event covered the breadth and depth of Melville studies and paid close attention to Melville’s dialogues with philosophy and aesthetic theo…
2017-08-17T17:53:53+0000
Colin Dewey All members of the Melville Society receive three print issues of our award-winning journal, Leviathan, per year. With membership rates beginning at only $25 this is an incredible bargain.
Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies | JHU Press press.jhu.edu EditorSamuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley Steven Olsen-Smith, Leviathan PODCAST: Steven Olsen-Smith, Leviathan Leviathan features a bounty of scholarly articles, notes, reviews, and creative writing of a critical, theoretical, cultural, or historical nature on the impressive body of wor...
2017-08-17T22:46:48+0000
Eileen Valentino Flaxman MOBY DICK - Ch. 16 – THE SHIP is about everything being ready for sail: the crew is on board, the larder is stocked. But no Captain Ahab. For days, the men are in limbo, waiting for their captain to arrive . . . A ship in the harbor a ship not at sea is no ship at all, strange and solitary. A ship with no captain, not anywhere seen is not yet alive but mere joints and beams. But when sails unfurl and Ahab walks the deck and the salt spray stings the back of my neck Then the Pequod will reign and come into its own With the ocean its kingdom and the waves its throne.
2017-08-18T17:54:45+0000
Greg Lennes From Providence Journal: The Berkshire County Historical Society's annual hike up Monument Mountain on August 6th:
Annual Berkshires hike marks a literary moment providencejournal.com A visit to western Massachusetts includes a stop at Monument Mountain and Arrowhead, the home of the great author Herman Melville.
2017-08-18T12:59:44+0000
Greg Lennes Melvillean Trivia: October Mountain Shelter along the Massachusetts Appalachian Trail is said to have been named by Melville, who wrote “One fine morning I sallied forth upon the errand I had much ado finding the best road to the shanty. No one seemed to know where it was exactly. It lay in a very lonely part of the country, a densely wooded mountain on one side (which I call October Mountain on account of its bannered aspect in that month), and a thicketed swamp on the other.” (From his short story - COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO ! OR THE CROWING OF THE NOBLE COCK BENEVENTANO" - 1853). Here is the present shelter in the October Mountain State Forest:
October Mountain Shelter youtube.com October Mountain Shelter
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Colin Dewey Note to members: The Melville Society will now be communicating with members via email rather than snail mail. The Executive Committee has chosen "Survey Monkey" as our platform for official polling and elections, so we will no longer send paper ballots. Please accept Survey Monkey messages from the Melville Society and make sure when you renew your Society membership that your email and postal mailing addresses are up to date. If you have opted-out of Survey Monkey emails in the past you will not receive ballot or election materials. To opt-in visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/optin.aspx Note that this not affect our journal, Leviathan, which you will continue to receive just as you have been. Thank you!
SurveyMonkey: Free online survey software & questionnaire tool surveymonkey.com Opt in or out of receiving emails from SurveyMonkey.
2017-08-17T22:56:27+0000
Colin Dewey Visit http://melvillesociety.org/ to learn about the society and membership.
Home melvillesociety.org A society dedicated to the study and appreciation of the nineteenth-century American author Herman Melville
2017-08-17T22:43:41+0000
Colin Dewey Established in 1947, the Melville Society is one of the largest international single-author societies, dedicated to the study of the life and works of Herman Melville, and their cultural impact since the nineteenth century. The organization enjoys the fellowship of scholars, artists, teachers, writers, readers, and enthusiasts throughout the world. All members receive our award-winning journal Leviathan, which is published three times a year by Johns Hopkins University Press, and offers scholarly articles, book and art reviews, Society news, and Melville-related current events. With subscriptions starting at just $25 per year, our membership remains an incredible bargain. To join, or learn more, go to: http://melvillesociety.org/membership.
2017-08-17T22:41:04+0000

From Our Photo Collections

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Fellowships and Scholarships


Melville Society Archive
Walter E. Bezanson Fellowship
 
 
The Melville Society, under the auspices of the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford, offers an annual fellowship to help a scholar undertake research on Herman Melville at the Society’s Archive in the Research Library of the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

 

Click here for more information and application details.

 

New York Public Library
Short-term Research Fellowships

 

Graduate students or other affiliated academics whose work would benefit from visiting the Manuscripts and Archives Division to view collections such as the Gansevoort-Lansing collection, and Duyckinck family papers are encouraged to apply.

 

Click here for more information and application details.

Online Resources

Woodlawn Cemetary

WoodlawnWoodlawn Cemetary - final resting place of Herman, his wife, Elizabeth, and other family members. Click here to view photos of the gravesites.

 

125th Anniversary Celebration

125th Woodlawn

A celebration of Melville's life at Woodlawn Cemetary on the 125th anniversary of his passing.

Lansingburgh Historical Society

Melville House

Melville lived for nine years in this Lansingburgh house. It was here that he wrote Typee and Omoo. 

Berkshire Historical Society

ArrowheadMelville's Arrowhead home and farm in Pittsfield, MA where he wrote Moby-Dick and lived for most of the 1850s.

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