A lecture by Professor Hester Blum, Pennsylvania State University

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

Hester Blum is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. 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. Professor Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society. 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.