The Melville Society brings together scholars, readers, and artists through the study and appreciation of the life and works of the author Herman Melville.
Our award-winning journal, published three times a year by Johns Hopkins University Press, and available online at Project Muse
Volume 27 (2025)
The Melville Society has submitted one panel for the 2026 Modern Language Association annual convention, which will be held in Toronto, January 8-11, 2026. Read the panel descriptions and panelist rosters here.
The Melville Society is proposing two panels for the 2026 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, to be held in Toronto, Canada, January 8-11, 2026. This news item details the CFPs for “Thermal Melville” and “Melville and the Law” as well as the submission requirements.
We are happy to announce travel awards for the Melville Society's 14th International Conference, Oceanic Melville!
We will award at least five travel grants to help defray travel costs, lodging, and other expenses for conference participants with limited travel funding, in order to enable them to present their work. Grant recipients will receive $300 stipends and have their conference registration fees waived.
The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels at the 2025 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA, May 21st-24th, 2025.
At the 2025 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New Orleans, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals awarded Leviathan vol. 25 no. 3, “Melville in Public” as “Best Special Issue.”
Join the Melville Society at our two panels at the 2025 Modern Language Association annual convention in New Orleans, January 9-12, 2025. Read the panel descriptions and panelist rosters here.
The Hennig Cohen Prize for 2023 is awarded to Sari Altschuler for her essay “Babo’s ‘Mute’-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America,” published in PMLA, vol. 138, no. 5, 2023, pp. 1149-1164.
Join the Melville Society Cultural Project and friends at the New Bedford Whaling Museum for the 2025 Moby-Dick Marathon, January 3 to 5, 2025, for one of the world’s most renowned readings of Herman Melville’s iconic American novel, Moby-Dick. The Moby-Dick Marathon features a 25-hour read-a-thon from Saturday to Sunday, interspersed with exciting Melville-inspired activities. Enjoy engaging conversations with scholars from the Melville Society Cultural Project (MSCP), live performances, hands-on activities, and more.
Call for Papers: The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels at the 2025 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA, May 21st-24th, 2025.
Join us Saturday, September 28th for a virtual roundtable on Billy Budd at 100, moderated by Brian Yothers and Jennifer Greiman of Leviathan and featuring John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, John Paul Wenke, Edouard Marsoin, and Lenora Warren.
Please consider submitting or nominating articles and chapters on the works of Herman Melville published in 2023 for consideration for the Hennig Cohen Prize. Deadline Sept. 15th, 2024.
Call for Papers: Fourteenth International Melville Society Conference - University of Connecticut (maritime campus), Avery Point, Connecticut, USA, June 16-19, 2025 / Deadline for Proposals: October 15, 2024 / Conference Theme: Oceanic Melville
The Melville Society has submitted two panels for the 2025 Modern Language Association annual convention, which will be held in New Orleans, January 9-12, 2025. Read the panel descriptions and panelist rosters here.
The Hennig Cohen Prize for 2022 is awarded to Justina Torrance for her essay, “Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It," published in A New Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Blackwell).
Call for Papers: The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels for the 2025 Modern Language Association annual convention, which will be held in New Orleans, January 9-12, 2025.
Call for Papers: The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels at the 2024 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Chicago, IL, May 23rd-26th, 2024.
From January 5 - 7, 2024, the New Bedford Whaling Museum will host one of the world’s best known readings of Herman Melville’s iconic American novel, Moby-Dick.
“Medical Melville” - a roundtable sponsored by The Melville Society at the MLA 2024 convention, Thursday, January 4th at 12:00 noon.
Join us on Thursday, October 19, 7 PM EST on zoom for a presentation and discussion with Jonathan A. Cook exploring the 19th-century debate between religious skepticism and Christian faith in Herman Melville's shorter fiction and poetry.
Organized by the Melville Society and Melville's Marginalia Online.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum, in association with the Melville Society Cultural Project, has been awarded a $196,290 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its project “Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age.” The grant will fund a three-week Summer Institute for Teachers in 2024.
Call for nominations for the 2022 Hennig Cohen Prize. Deadline to submit nominations: September 30, 2023.
Join us for “A Melville Gam,” a discussion with and between recent Melvillean authors, Jennifer Greiman and Cody Marrs. They will be speaking about their recent books, Greiman’s Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form (Stanford UP, 2023), and Marrs’s Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things (Oxford UP, 2023). This event is free and will be held by zoom; please register in advance.
A Melville Gam with Jennifer Greiman and Cody Marrs
Wednesday, June 28, 2023, 8:00PM EST
In honor of the Melville Society’s 75th anniversary, Professor Dennis Berthold has generously pledged to match donations in any amount up to $25,000, directed to the Society’s Murray Endowment, between June 1 and November 1, 2023.
Saturday, May 6th, at 10:00am, Dr. John Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University, will present “Melville and Mutiny: From the Pacific to Wall Street,” addressing Melville’s transformation of himself and his characters in his involvement, in his life and his research, in mutinies, as they appear in “Bartleby” and “Billy Budd.”
Venue: Speakers' Hall, Keio Academy of New York (3 College Road, Purchase, New York 10577)
The Melville Society has organized two panels at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA, May 25-28th, 2023. Draft Schedule listed here.
Call for Papers: a proposed special issue of Leviathan on “Melville’s Queer Afterlives”
The Hennig Cohen Prize for 2021 goes to Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson for their article “Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s ‘Fragments,’” which was published in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
Call for Papers: The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels, plus one panel co-organized with the Conrad Society, at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention, to be held in Philadelphia, PA, January 4-7, 2024.
Call for Papers: The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Boston, MA, May 25-28th, 2023.
Call for nominations for the 2021 Hennig Cohen Prize. Deadline to submit nominations: December 21, 2022.
