Melville Society Panels at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference

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.

Schedule details listed below are subject to change

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Melville’s Sacred Texts

Session 3-G: Thursday, May 25, 2023, 11:30 am – 12:50 pm

Chair: Damien B. Schlarb, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

1. “Pierre and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Secularization,” Jonathan Cook, Independent Scholar

2. “Demythologizing Melville's The Confidence-Man and Clarel: Toward a Philosophy of Secularization,” Caroline Hildebrandt, École Normale Supérieure University of Lyon, France

3. “Melville’s ‘The Healing of the Blind,’” Samuel Otter, University of California: Berkley

4. “Finding Friends Out of Time: Postsecular Temporalities in Melville’s Later Fiction,” Caitlin Smith, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Melville’s Ecological Thinking

Session 15-H: Saturday, May 27, 2023, 8:30 am – 9:50 am

Chair: Jennifer Baker, New York University

1. “‘Use one seal—a hacked one’: Sealing Ecologies and the Ayiti Hypothesis in Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” Benjamin Hulett, Columbia University

2. "‘Black Land’: Herman Melville, Plantation Fossils, and America's Prehistory,” Jeffrey Adams, Syracuse University

3. “Melville’s Ecology of Friendship: Symbiosis and ‘The Maldive Shark,’” Tony McGowan, United States Military Academy

4. “Melville’s Ecology of Hunger,” Abby Goode, Plymouth State University

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For more details on the American Literature Association Conference, see https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/