A Bicentennial Celebration The Twelfth International Melville Society Conference will take place at New York University to celebrate the bicentennial of Herman Melville's birth in lower Manhattan in 1819. The conference will commemorate Melville's life, writings, and legacies through a series of papers and conversations devoted to the theme of “origins” broadly conceived. See the conference Call For Papers for details.
The conference will feature four days of panels, roundtables, and plenary talks. Special events will include a walking tour of Melville's Manhattan, workshops at the South Street Seaport, a reception at the New York Public Library where significant Melville-related manuscripts are housed, and an add-on excursion to Mystic, CT, to visit the historic seaport, museum, and 1841 whale ship Charles W. Morgan. Panels and talks will take place at New York University's Washington Square campus, midway between Melville's birthplace at 6 Pearl Street and the block of East 26th Street where he spent the last three decades of his life. The conference will feature plenary addresses by Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Rodrigo Lazo, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine. Melville's Origins is sponsored by the Melville Society and NYU's Department of English, with additional support from the New York Public Library and the South Street Seaport Museum. |
Images from top: 1860 photograph of Herman Melville, Berkshire Athaneum; Photograph of street sign at E. 26th Street, where Melville lived from 1863 to 1891; "View in Wall Street from Corner of Broad" (1846), New York Public Library Digital Collections; "New York, taken from the Battery Place" (1874), New York Public Library Digital Collections; Detail of Melville's tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery. |
