News and Events

Wednesday, February 1, 2023 at 4 PM (EDT)

Weird Moby-Dick with Dr. Hester Blum

Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Hester Blum will discuss her new Oxford edition of Melville's best-known novel, which is designed to be an edition for the 21st century: one that recognizes that each generation of readers will remake classic novels anew.

Moby-Dick. Second Edition. Herman Melville Edited by Hester Blum Oxford World's Classics. Edited by a leading Melville scholar, past president of the Herman Melville Society, and a participant in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed.

Hester Blum is Professor of English at Penn State. She is the editor of the new Oxford World's Classics edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives and The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, among other volumes. Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society, and her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed.

Register Here!