All Astir

The call for papers for the Eleventh International Melville Conference, “Melville’s Crossings,” is available on the Melville Society website <http://melvillesociety.org/>. The conference will be held at King’s College London on June 27–30, 2017. For more information, visit the conference website at <https://melvilleatkings.wordpress.com/>. Thank you to Ed Sugden and Janet Floyd, the conference directors, for organizing what promises to be a wonderful conference.

Please join us for the two Melville Society sessions that will be held at the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia this coming January. The first (Session #111), to be held on Thursday, January 5, 3:30–4:45, is entitled “Melville’s Taxonomies.” Speakers will examine how Melville’s works from Mardi on treat matter, fashioning terrestrial landscapes, oceanic milieus, and vegetal life into agencies that revise what counts as a person. Branka Arsi (Columbia Univ.) will preside. Paul B. Downes (Univ. of Toronto) will speak on “Moby Dick and The Ecological Thought,” Monique Allewaert (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) on “Insect Arrangement: Melville’s Untimely Taxonomies,” and Maurice S. Lee (Boston Univ.) on “Organizing Melville.” Elisa Tamarkin (Berkeley) will serve as respondent. The second session (#314), “Melville and Black Lives Matter,” will be held on Friday, January 6, 1:45–3:00. It will address how Melville’s art both speaks to racial crises and mediates on philosophical dilemmas, political unrest, and concepts of history. Black writers, including Ralph Ellison, C. L. R. James, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, and David Bradley, have 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? Christopher Freeburg (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) will preside. Gary Vaughn Rasberry (Stanford Univ.) will speak on “C. L. R. James and Herman Melville: Moby-Dick as an Antitotalitarian Novel,” Christine Ann Wooley (St. Mary’s College) on “Melville, Mutuality, and the Matter of Black Lives,” and Brenna Casey (Duke Univ.) on “‘Sinister Eye’: The Shrouded Women of Melville’s Benito Cereno.” Ivy Wilson (Northwestern Univ.) will serve as respondent.

John Bryant, Editor of the Melville Electronic Library (and, of course, the former Editor of Leviathan), submitted a grant report to the National Endowment of the Humanities on the status of the MEL project. The report highlights two important achievements: Itinerary, the mapping/timeline/annotation tool developed for MEL in coordination with Hofstra University Digital Research Center programmer Mark Reeves, and an increasing number of affiliations. As Bryant writes: “An important advancement in Itinerary development now allows anyone to create a historical mapping project, thus broadening the tool’s potential for building a community of digital scholars, in Melville studies and all fields.” Bryant has added International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), the New York Public Library, DigiLab, and SUNY Maritime to MEL’s existing list of affiliates: the Houghton Library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, and the Melville Society Archive located at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. He notes: “The value of academic affiliation and the building of a community of scholars should not be underestimated, in terms of editorial sustainability, technical standards and development, and cost sharing. To make MEL’s scholarly editions viable and sustainable, the tools used to build them must be reliable and generally useful not only to Melville scholars but also to scholars with other literary or editorial concerns. Put another way, if MEL’s editions are to be used, their underlying technology must be interoperable with other digital archives, and interoperability is achieved through collaboration and the sharing of standards and methods with other digital groups.”

Bryant met with Professor John Rocco in May to inspect the Snug Harbor Archive held by SUNY Maritime, which has begun digitizing its collection. The digitization of the archive will be linked to MEL’s Biography room. Melville’s youngest brother Thomas was the governor of Snug Harbor, a sailor retirement facility on Staten Island, until his death in 1884; Melville visited his brother and...