Conference Program
12th International Melville Society Conference
MEETING LOCATIONS:
Plenary Talks: Hemmerdinger Hall, Ground Floor, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East (enter at 32 Waverly or 31 Washington Place)
Panels: Kimmel Center, 9th Floor, 60 Washington Square South
Digital Panels: Bobst Library, Room 745, 70 Washington Square South
Roundtables: Jurow Hall, Ground Floor, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East (enter at 32 Waverly or 31 Washington Place)
See Campus and Neighborhood for a map of conference locations on Washington Square.
Plenary Talks: Hemmerdinger Hall, Ground Floor, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East (enter at 32 Waverly or 31 Washington Place)
Panels: Kimmel Center, 9th Floor, 60 Washington Square South
Digital Panels: Bobst Library, Room 745, 70 Washington Square South
Roundtables: Jurow Hall, Ground Floor, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East (enter at 32 Waverly or 31 Washington Place)
See Campus and Neighborhood for a map of conference locations on Washington Square.
MONDAY, JUNE 17, 2019
8:00-9:00am REGISTRATION AND COFFEE [HEMMERDINGER]
9:00am WELCOME [HEMMERDINGER]
9:15-10:30am PLENARY ADDRESS BY WYN KELLEY [HEMMERDINGER]
“‘Empire in Her Eyes’: Melville and America’s Brazilian Original”
11:00am-12:30pm SESSION ONE
1. PANEL: NATIONAL ORIGINS AND IMMIGRATION (Chair: Nancy Bentley) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Kohei Furuya, “Isabel’s Immigrant Song: Different Origins of the City in Pierre”
Robert Levine, “Race, Emigration, and Nation in Redburn”
Kathryn Mudgett, “‘Civilized Bodies’ and ‘Barbarous Souls’: Melville’s Immigrants and Twenty-First-Century Exceptionalism”
2. PANEL: GOTHIC MELVILLE (Chair: Monika Elbert) [KIMMEL 909]
Jonathan Cook, “Ahab as Gothic Hero-Villain”
Rosa Martinez, “Melville’s Spanish Masquerade into (Babo’s) American Gothic”
David Cody, “‘Truth comes in with darkness’/‘Our house has windows of gold’: Subverting the Melvillean Gothic”
Ellen Weinauer, “Melville, Marriage, and the Gothic”
3. PANEL: SPECULATORS AND CON MEN (Chair: Christopher Sten) [KIMMEL 912]
Dennis Mischke, “‘Quite an original’—Melville’s Aesthetics of Mistrust”
Yukiko Oshima, “‘Victims of auto da fe’ in The Confidence-Man: Manco Capac, Pizarro, and Mocmohoc/Mock-Mohawk”
Chris Jenkins, “‘Original Energy’ in The Confidence-Man”
James Godley, “Bargaining with Finitude: Melville’s Compulsive Speculators”
12:30-1:45pm LUNCH (on your own)
1:45—3:15pm SESSION TWO
4. PANEL: REPRESENTING SLAVERY (Chair and Respondent: Mark Miller) [KIMMEL 909]
Takayuki Tatsumi, “Pentecost as Metaphor: The Impact of the Pinkster Festival on Melville’s Works”
Rebecca Cheong, “Passing Between Spaces of Vision and Opacity: The Poetics of the Glance in ‘Benito Cereno’”
Tomoyuki Zettsu, “‘The Paradise of Bachelors’ and the American South”
5. PANEL: MELVILLE’S PUNCTUATION (Chair: Samuel Otter) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Marcy Dinius, “‘Some bold or indelicate expression’: Reading the Asterisks in ’Benito Cereno’”
Geoffrey Sanborn, “Melville, Exclamation Points, and the Aesthetics of Thinking”
Cindy Weinstein, “Pause and Effect: Punctuation in Pierre”
6. PANEL: REVIVING MELVILLE (Chair: Mary K. Bercaw Edwards) [KIMMEL 912]
Scott Norsworthy, “New Orleans Origins of the Melville Revival: Armour Caldwell at Tulane, 1908”
Martina Pfeiler, “‘The Time has Come for a Melville Revival’: Edwin Emery Slosson’s Journalistic Contributions to the Origins of
Melville’s Revival in New York City”
David Farnell, “Their Great Original: Moby-Dick as Literary Inspiration”
Paul Wright, “Fast Fish and Loose Fish: The Quest for a Collected Edition of Melville”
3:30-5:00pm SESSION THREE
7. PANEL: POLYNESIA (Chair: Geoffrey Sanborn) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Tom Wright, “Ahab and the Primitive Origins of Charisma”
Joel Pfister, “Typee as Cross-Cultural Theoretical Lens”
Pilar Martínez Benedí, “Melville’s Polynesian Soundscapes”
Alex Calder, “‘The Whiteness of the Whale’: Taboo and the Origins of the Sacred”
8. PANEL: MELVILLE’S TEXTUAL VEERINGS (Chair: Dawn Coleman) [KIMMEL 909]
Edouard Marsoin, “Linguistic Veerings: The Origin of Speeches (or Lack Thereof) in Pierre and The Confidence-Man”
Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, “Displacing Origin: Melville’s Intertextual Veerings”
Cécile Roudeau, “Stutter, Mutter, Murmur: Verbal Veerings and the Drifting Origins of a Democratic Power in Billy Budd, Sailor”
9. PANEL: MELVILLE AND THE NON-HUMAN (Chair: Michael Jonik) [KIMMEL 912]
Alice Hofmann, “Hunilla, Animal Suffering and Rousseau’s Influence”
Kelly Ross, “Tobias Picker’s ‘The Encantadas’: A Nonhuman Melodrama”
Michael Jonik, “Ideal Embodiments and Nonhuman Sensations in Mardi”
7:00pm RECEPTION AND EXHIBIT AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (see Special Events for details)
476 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2019
9:00-10:30am SESSION FOUR
10. PANEL: COMING BESIDE MELVILLE: DESIRING SE(A)MEN (Chair: Mark Kelley; Respondent: Peter Coviello)
[KIMMEL 905/907]
Matthew Crow, “Herman Melville, Philip Hoare, and the Desire for Deep Knowing in Law and Literature”
Jessica Floyd, “Consuming the Maritime Body: Melville’s Billy Budd, Sea Chanteys, and the Homoerotic Gaze”
Mark Kelley, “Cpt. Ahab or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Labor”
Matthew Knip, “Tracing the Material Culture of Homosocial Desire from Van Buskirk and Melville into Painting, Advertising, and Photography”
11. PANEL: FOUNDING POLITICS (Chair: Jennifer Greiman) [KIMMEL 909]
Jennifer Greiman, “‘The Insphered Sphere of Spheres’: Founding Violence in Mardi”
Michelle Sizemore, “Wandering the State Void in Israel Potter”
Paul Downes, “‘A certain nameless terror’: Moby-Dick and the Conceptual Violence of Capitalist Appropriation”
Nathan Wolff, “Billy Takes it Personally”
12. PANEL: CROSS-CULTURAL READING (Chair: Alex Calder) [KIMMEL 912]
Daniel Göske, “Original and Translation: The Early German Melville”
Federico Bellini, “Myth and Origins in Herman Melville and Cesare Pavese”
Leyli Jamali, “‘Original’ Reflections: Ishmael from New Bedford to Karbala”
13. PANEL: DIGITAL MELVILLE (Chair: John Bryant) [BOBST 745]
Nick Laiacona, “Possibilities and Challenges in the Digital Critical Archive”
Steven Olsen-Smith, “Data Visualization at Melville's Marginalia Online”
Christopher Ohge, “Melville’s Bits of Wisdom; or, Reading Melville’s Philosophy with Computers”
SESSION FIVE 10:45am-12:15pm
14. PANEL: AUTHORSHIP AND BOOK HISTORY (Chair: Patricia Crain) [KIMMEL 909]
Tim Morris, “The Origins of Disappointment: Biographical Criticism and The Piazza Tales”
Katie McGettigan, “Richard Bentley, International Copyright, and the Origins of The Whale, or Moby Dick”
John Wenke, “Prefigurations: Melville’s Mardi and the Origins of Moby-Dick”
15. PANEL: MELVILLE AS MUSE (Moderator: Robert K. Wallace) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Contemporary artists discuss the influence of Melville on their work:
Matt Kish, Peter Martin, David Rosenthal, Aileen Callahan, and Eleen Lin
16. PANEL: ECOCRITICAL APPROACHES (Chair: Tony McGowan) [KIMMEL 912]
Stephen Fragano, “Ecocritical Form: Melville’s ‘The Encantadas’”
Richard J. King, “Did the Whale Diminish?: Eco-guilt, Extinction, and Whale Populations in Moby-Dick”
Peter Balaam, “Melville: Rumors of the Anthropocene”
David Blake, “The Unnatural Stump: Originating Disability in Moby-Dick”
17. DIGITAL DEMONSTRATION & DISCUSSION (see Special Events for details) [BOBST 745]
“Mapping Melville and Martí in Manhattan: Itinerary and Community in the Digital 19C”
Led by Thomas Augst, John Bryant, Jamie Folsom, Kelley Kreitz, and Nick Laiacona (event will run until 12:45).
12:15-1:45pm LUNCH (on your own)
1:45-3:15pm SESSION SIX
18. PANEL: EXPERIMENTAL MELVILLE (Chair and Respondent: Kylan Rice) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Dan Beachy-Quick, “Critical Poesis, Lyric Consciousness, & The Struggle to Say What’s Obvious”
Andrew DuBois, “Chasing the Great White Cachalot: E.J. Pratt’s Melvillean Swerves”
K.L. Evans, “Back When ‘Experimental' Meant True: Melville's Plato, Melville's Matthew Arnold”
19. PANEL: MELVILLE IN THE CLASSROOM (Chair: Timothy Marr) [KIMMEL 909]
Matthew Bruen, “Melville on the First Day of College: Pedagogical Strategies and Exercises”
Don Dingledine, “Anxious Origins: Anchoring and Unmooring in the Moby-Dick Seminar”
Daniel Herman, “Moby-Dick and the Writing-Centered High School Classroom”
Jeffrey Markham, “Of Whales in Paint: Visual Journals and the Reading Experience”
20. PANEL: SUBJECTIVITY AND SELFHOOD (Chair: Eric Wertheimer) [KIMMEL 912]
Arturo Corujo, “Call Me White Jacket: Pulling Apart the Seams of Original Belonging in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket”
John Rendeiro, “‘An absentee from existence’”: Place and Community in ‘John Marr’ and Septimius Felton”
Anne-Claire Le Reste, “Melville; or, Mildness”
Burns Woodward, “Ishmael’s Brain: The Psychiatric Origins of Moby-Dick”
21. ROUNDTABLE: MELVILLE’S RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR ORIGINS (Moderator: Brian Yothers) [JUROW]
Dawn Coleman, “Postsecular Melville”
Jonathan A. Cook, “Melville and Blasphemy”
Susanna Compton Underland, “Gendered Domesticity in Melville’s Secular Spaces”
Caitlin Smith-Oyekole, “Irradiated Vapor and Stony Dust: Melville’s Miasmic Hermeneutics”
Damien Schlarb, “Melville’s ‘Second Naivete’: Biblical Hermeneutics and Aesthetics”
Brian Yothers, “‘Unchristian Solomon’: Anti-Supersessionism and the Origins of Melville’s Secular Faith”
3:30-5:00pm SESSION SEVEN
22. PANEL: MELVILLE, CAPITAL, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE (Chair: Alex Moskowitz) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Michael Druffel, “Melville, Marx, and The Theatre of the Oppressed: Moby-Dick as Uneasy Synthesis Between Capital and Labor”
Alex Moskowitz, “Confidence, Capital, and the Perception of a New Humanity”
Maki Sadahiro, “The Legacy of New Deal Liberalism in John Huston’s Moby-Dick”
Heyward Ehrlich, “Pierre in Context: Brook Farm in New York”
23. PANEL: QUEER MELVILLE (Chair: Jordan Stein) [KIMMEL 909]
Rodrigo Andrés, “The Origins of Houses: Queer Temporalities vs. Chrono-Normativity”
David Greven, “Melville’s Queer Edgar: The Shakespearean Origins of Moby-Dick”
Ikuno Saiki, “Something Healing”: Domesticity and Fatherhood in Billy Budd, Sailor”
24. PANEL: ON WHITENESS (Chair: Ezra Tawil) [KIMMEL 912]
Casey Pratt, “Race as Origin of National Character in Mardi and Redburn”
Hannah Murray, “Bartleby and the Origins of Institutional Whiteness”
Ryan Fics, “Subversive Geology: Race and Unconditional Democracy”
25. ROUNDTABLE: MELVILLE AND SPANISH AMERICA
(Co-Conveners: Emilio Irigoyen and Nicholas Spengler; Moderator: Rodrigo Lazo) [JUROW]
Antonio Barrenechea, “Moby-Dick as Summa Americana”
Anna Brickhouse, “Spanish American Melville and Earthquake Philosophy”
Brenna Casey, “From the Tapada Limeña to the Chola Widow: Melville’s Ciphered Rejoinders”
Yoshiaki Furui, “The Great Nation of Uncertain Futurity: Non-Human Time in ‘The Encantadas’”
Emilio Irigoyen, “Quito, Massachusetts: South America in Melville’s Mapping of Home”
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Maritime Pedagogies of the Spanish Language”
Nicholas Spengler, “Those Juan Fernández Blues: Solitude and Sociability in Melville’s Americas”
5:30-7:30pm FILM SCREENINGS (see Special Events for details)
David Shaerf’s Call Us Ishmael and Daniel Emond’s The Whale and Dusk, followed by Q&A
Cantor Film Center, 36 E. 8th Street
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2019
9:00-10:15am PLENARY ADDRESS BY RODRIGO LAZO [HEMMERDINGER]
“Israel Potter Deported”
10:45am-12:15pm SESSION EIGHT
26. PANEL: MELVILLE’S MANHATTAN (Chair: Thomas Augst) [KIMMEL 909]
Christopher Rice, “The Metropolis and Mental Life: Georg Simmel's City Psyche in Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Helene Remiszewska, “Mapping the Shadows of Bartleby’s Wall Street”
Mark Noonan, “Mapping Melville’s Geographies in ‘The City of Print’”
27. PANEL: MELVILLE INCORPORATED: HERMAN MELVILLE AND DARTMOUTH COLLEGE AT 200 (Chair: Peter Jaros)
[KIMMEL 905/907]
Stefanie Mueller, “Herman Melville’s Corporate Agents”
Lisa Siraganian, “Bartleby, the Corporate Man: A Story of the Synthetic Person’s First Amendment”
Christine A. Wooley, “Persistence of Parts: Incorporation in Moby-Dick”
Peter Jaros, “The Corporate Form in Strange Waters”
28. PANEL: MELVILLE'S SOURCES (Chair: Steven Olsen-Smith) [KIMMEL 912]
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, “Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal: Melville’s Borrowings”
Yumiko Koizumi, “The Passage of the Pequod: Timothy Dwight and Herman Melville”
David O. Dowling, “Newspaperman as Confidence Man: Tracing the Origins of Melville’s PIO Man in the Editorial Practice of Horace
Greeley”
John Rocco, “Melville and Turnbull’s A Voyage: Origins, Endings, and Captain/Governor Thomas Melville”
12:15-1:45pm LUNCH (on your own)
12:30-1:30pm TOUR OF THE MERCHANT’S HOUSE MUSEUM (see Special Events for details)
29 E. 4th Street, New York, NY
We will ask for sign-up and payment in advance: $18 per person and $13 for seniors
1:45-3:15pm SESSION NINE
29. PANEL: MELVILLE AND THE BIBLE (Chair: Ariel Silver; Respondent: John Matteson) [KIMMEL 909]
Ariel Silver, “The Patriarchal Mind of Melville: A Matriarchal Critique”
Damien Schlarb, “Melville, the Wisdom Books, and the Alternative Origins of Postcritique”
Dean Mendell, “Melville and Whaling Narratives for the Young: A Study of Opposites”
30. PANEL: GEOGRAPHIES OF MOBY-DICK (Chair: Martha Elena Rojas) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Marissa Grunes, “Ahab in Antarctica: The White Whale and the White Continent”
Robin Miskolcze, “From Moby-Dick to Contemporary Documentary: Experiencing the Oceanic”
Jennifer Renee Davenport, “The Origins of Bodies of Depths in Moby-Dick”
Christina Bevilacqua, “The Nicholson Whaling Collection at the Providence Public Library”
31. PANEL: EMPIRE AND EXPANSION (Chair: Ezra Tawil) [KIMMEL 912]
Yui Kasane, “The Subversive Function of Tommo’s Narrative: Reading Typee from a Transpacific Perspective”
Michiko Shimokobe, “Mardi in Nineteenth-Century Formless America―Oceanic Roaming or Global Roaming”
José Alfaro, “Conflicting Corrientes: The ‘Arriving’ Origins of Latinidad in ‘Benito Cereno’”
32. ROUNDTABLE: RETHINKING AHAB (Moderator: Meredith Farmer) [JUROW]
Meredith Farmer, “Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn”
Christopher Castiglia, “Approaching Ahab Blind”
Steve Mentz, “Sailing Without Ahab: Beyond Cyborg Materialism”
Russell Sbriglia, “‘Naught Beyond': Ahab's Transcendental Materialism”
Jonathan Schroeder, “The Whiteness of the Whale: Race and the Matter of Monomania”
Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese, “Neurological Crossings: Ahab, Pip, and Mirror-Touch Synesthesia”
3:30-5:00pm SESSION TEN
33. DISCUSSION: NEW DIRECTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN MELVILLE STUDIES [KIMMEL 909]
A series of brief presentations about Melville-related projects and opportunities, followed by Q&A with officers of the Melville Society and Melville Society Cultural Project, a former Bezanson Fellow, and some of the editors at Leviathan, Melville Electronic Library (MEL), and Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO). Conversations can continue at the Reception for Early-Career Professionals immediately after the panel.
34. PANEL: AH, BARTLEBY! (Chair: Wendy Anne Lee) [KIMMEL 912]
Peter Chapin, “Dispositions: Bartleby, Dickens, and the Impersonal”
Aleksandra Hernandez, “From Work to Text: Bartleby, the Alien Scrivener”
Ralph James Savarese, “Will You Please Stop Calling Bartleby ‘Autistic’?”
Yuta Ito, “Inter-mimetic Affects in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’: Eating, Reading, Communication”
35. PANEL: ADAPTING MOBY-DICK (Chair: Dennis Berthold) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Robert K. Wallace, “Moby-Dick from Dallas to Barcelona: the Birth, Growth, and Evolution of Heggie and Scheer’s Grand Opera for
the 21st Century”
Samuel Otter, “Orson Welles’s White Whale”
Alex Benson, “Animated Natures: Dicky Moe; or the Mouse”
Shelley Piasecka, “Adapting Classic Texts for the Stage: Ensemble and Multi-Role in Moby-Dick”
5:00-6:30pm RECEPTION FOR EARLY-CAREER PROFESSIONALS (see Special Events for details)
Event Space, Department of English, 244 Greene Street, Ground Floor
7:00-9:00pm SWIMMING THROUGH LIBRARIES (see Special Events for details)
Rare Books Room, Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway
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THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2019
9:00-10:30am SESSION ELEVEN
36. PANEL: MELVILLE, POET (Chair: Eric Wertheimer) [KIMMEL 909]
Steve Andrews, “Baseball between the Lines”
Shogo Tanokuchi, “The Revolutionary Ideals Manipulated: Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and ‘the Second American Revolution’”
Onur Ayaz, “Immersive Properties of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land”
Mikayo Sakuma, “What is the Poem to Melville? The Origin of a Poet in Mardi and its Development”
37. PANEL: MOBY-DICK ON FILM (Chair: Jaime Campomar) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Jaime Campomar, “The Pictures behind the Words: Ekphrastic Networks in the Adaptation Process of John Huston’s Moby Dick”
Ashley Gangi, “Cultural Soundings: The Sea Beast as Melvillean Myth”
James Noel, “Hill and Gully Rider: Race and Extemporaneous Composition in John Huston’s Moby-Dick”
38. PANEL: THE SUPERNATURAL (Chair: John Wenke) [KIMMEL 912]
Emma Butler-Probst, “‘It Spiralizes!’: Herman Melville’s Theory of Spirituality”
Christopher Christiansen, “‘A shocking sharkish business enough for all parties’: Dark Ecology and Demonology in Moby-Dick”
Ali Chetwynd, “Bartleby, Dupin, and Poe’s ‘so-human-it’s-inhuman’ Trope in Late Melville”
10:45am-12:15pm SESSION TWELVE
39. PANEL: MELVILLE AND GENDER (Chair: Wyn Kelley) [KIMMEL 905/907]
Rita Bode, “‘The supernatural hand in mine’: Gendered Embodiments in Moby-Dick”
Kylan Rice, “Ephemerality and Domestic Realism in Melville’s Weeds and Wildings”
Jordan Stein and Adam Fales, “The Future Mrs. Melville: Elizabeth Shaw Melville and Literary Collaboration”
Wadia Rabhi, “Lost Origins, Recurrent Supplements: Herman Melville and the Anxieties of Authorial Subjectivity”
40. PANEL: CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE (Chair: Christopher Ohge) [KIMMEL 909]
Sean Moreland, “‘A Few Shadowy Glimpses of Nature’: On the Shared Origins of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym in
Good’s Book of Nature”
Timothy Marr, “Germ and Sperm: Melville’s Generative Inklings”
Tom Nurmi, “Ground-Vines and Avatars: On Weeds and Wildings”
Miran Bozovic, “Skeleton in the Closet: Melville and Bentham”
41. PANEL: AESTHETICS AND IMAGINATION (Chair: Dennis Berthold) [KIMMEL 912]
José Antonio Arellano, “American History as a Work of Art: Melville’s Aesthetic Autonomy during the Reconstruction”
Shoko Tsuji, “Mob(y)-Dick? The Astor Place Riot as the Origin of Melville’s ‘Riotous’ Imagination”
Sarah Thwaites, “Melville and the Origins of Photography”
2:00-6:00pm TOURS, WORKSHOPS, AND PRESENTATIONS AT THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT (see Special Events for details)
6:00-8:00pm RECEPTION ON THE WAVERTREE (see Special Events for details)
Pier 16, 167 John Street, New York, NY
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FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 2019
OPTIONAL EXCURSION TO MYSTIC, CT (see Special Events for details)
(for additional cost of $75)
7:30am Depart Washington Square by charter bus
10:00-10:30am Arrive at Mystic
11:00-11:45am Whaleboat demonstration
12:00-1:00pm Opportunity for all those interested to row a whaleboat and handle a harpoon
1:00-2:00pm Lunch
2:00-3:00pm Moby-Dick tour of Charles W. Morgan led by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (1st group)
3:00-4:00pm Moby-Dick tour of Charles W. Morgan led by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (2nd group)
3:30-4:00pm The furling of the sails of the Charles W. Morgan
4:00-4:45pm Sea music performance for conference attendees
5:30pm Depart Mystic and arrive back at Washington Square around 8:00pm
