Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Oxford World’s Classics.
Editor and author of a new introduction. May, 2022.
The News at the Ends of the Earth
The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration appeared from Duke University Press in 2019; it studies polar expeditionary newspapers and other forms of knowledge that circulate geophysical and climatic extremity, both in the age of polar exploration and in our current moment of climate change and polar resource extraction.
Open access version here: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=1005199
Turns of Event
A collection of essays, Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2016. Contributors include Monique Allewaert, Ralph Bauer, Martin Brückner, Michelle Burnham, Christopher Castiglia, Sean Goudie, Meredith McGill, and Geoffrey Sanborn.
The View from the Masthead
In The View from the Masthead (2008), the first book to study the literary culture of sailors, I explore the simultaneity of labor and contemplation in antebellum American sea narratives, as well as the maritime epistemology I call the “sea eye.” The book won the John Garner Maritime Research Award.
Horrors of Slavery
My scholarly edition of William Ray’s Barbary captivity narrative Horrors of Slavery (2008) brings to light a crucial episode in the early history of American relations with Islamic states.
Co-Editor, with Candace Jensen and Jacinda Russell, “On the Cold Edge: Creative Meditations on Svalbard,” Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture (forthcoming).
Special Forum Co-Editor, with Fidalis Buehler, Mike Calway-Fagen, Mary Eyring, Iping Liang, and Brian Russell Roberts, "Archipelagoes, Oceans, and American Visuality," Journal of Transnational American Studies 10:1 (2019).
Special Focus Issue Editor, "Oceanic Studies," Atlantic Studies 10:2 (2013): 151-227.
“‘The World Is Here Too’: Out of Place in Svalbard,” Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture 2:1 (forthcoming 2025).
Provocation, “Atlantification: Facing the Atlantic from the Arctic,” Atlantic Studies 21:1 (2024): 192-194.
“Icebound, Not Down,” Post45 Contemporaries, https://post45.org/2023/09/icebound-not-down/.
"I, Nuligak and Indigenous Arctic Temporalities," After Ice: Cold Humanities for a Warming Planet, eds. Rafico Ruiz, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields (University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming) 49 pp.
Afterword, "Shipping," Atlantic Studies special issue on "Transoceanic Kinship," edited by Katharina Fackler and Silvia Schultermandl (2022).
"Archipelagic Pym," Poe Studies: History, Theory Interpretation 54 (October 2021).
Introduction, Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (Oxford World Classics, 2022).
Foreword, "Literary Provisioning at Sea," Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
"Introduction: Archipelagoes/Oceans/American Visuality," co-authored with Mary Eyring, Iping Liang, and Brian Russell Roberts, Journal of Transnational American Studies 10:1 (2019): 5-21.
"Arctic Nation," English Language Notes 57:1 (April 2019): 72-81.
"Melville in the Arctic," Leviathan 20 (March 2018): 74-84.
"Charles Francis Hall's Arctic Researches," The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture, eds. Steven Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (Routledge Press, 2017), 47-65.
Roundtable on Turns of Event, co-authored with Hannah Lauren Murray, J. Michelle Coghlan, Stephanie Palmer, and Tom F. Wright, Journal of American Studies 51:3 (2017).
"'Bitter with the Salt of Continents': Rachel Carson and Oceanic Returns," Women's Studies Quarterly 45: 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2017): 287-291.
"Introduction: Academic Positioning Systems," Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2016), 1-12.
"Speaking Substances: Ice" Los Angeles Review of Books. March 21, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/speaking-substances-ice.
Part of a series of four essays on anthropocene media:
Jamie L. Jones on Oil.
Kyla Schuller on Bodies.
Dana Luciano on Rock.
"Terraqueous Planet: The Case for Oceanic Studies," The Planetary Turn: Art, Dialogue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st-Century, eds. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Northwestern University Press, 2015).
"The News at the End of the Earth: Polar Periodicals," Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, eds. Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson (New York University Press, 2014).
"Melville and Oceanic Studies," New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge, 2013).
"First Person Nautical: Poetry and Play at Sea," co-author Jason Rudy, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1:1 (Spring 2013) 189-194.
"Introduction: Oceanic Studies," Atlantic Studies 10:2 (2013): 151-155
"John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration," American Literature 84:2 (June 2012)
"Melville and the Novel of the Sea," Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: 2011)
"The Prospect of Oceanic Studies," PMLA 125:3 (May 2010)
"'No Life You Have Known': Or, Melville's Contemporary Critics," Leviathan 13:1 (March 2011)
"Douglass's and Melville's 'Alphabets of the Blind,'" Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 257-78.
"Introduction," Horrors of Slavery, or, The American Tars in Tripoli, by William Ray, ed. Hester Blum (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, Subterranean Lives Series, 2008), ix-xxix.
"American Graves, Pacific Plots," American Literary Geographies: Space and Cultural Production, 1588-1888, eds. Martin Brückner and Hsuan L. Hsu (University of Delaware Press, 2007), 149-170.
"Before and After the Mast: James Fenimore Cooper and Ned Myers," Pirates, Jack Tar, and Memory: New Directions in American Maritime History, eds. Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak (Mystic Seaport Museum, CT, 2007), 115-134.
"Atlantic Trade," A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 113-128.
Keynote Addresses
Atlantic Studies Twentieth Anniversary Madrid Symposium, March 2023
Semiannual Meeting of the American Antiquarian Society, New York City, April 21, 2022
English Language and Literature Association of Korea, Seoul, South Korea, December 17, 2021
19th Annual Shackleton Autumn School, Athy, Ireland, October 25, 2019
Polar Day, UC Davis Polar Forum, April 5, 2019
Austrian Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Vienna, November 2018
Imagining the Coast: A Public Humanities Symposium, Fairfield University, Mystic Seaport, the Maritime Studies Program at University of Connecticut Avery Point, CT Humanities, and the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Consortium, September 15, 2018
Eleventh Annual International Melville Conference, London, June 2017
Movement and Mobility Symposium, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, April 27-28, 2017
Archipelagoes/Oceans/Americas Symposium, Brigham Young University, October 6-7, 2016
Florida International University/Bayerische Amerika-Akademie, June 7, 2016
McNeil Center Biennial Graduate Student Conference, "The Power of Stories: Authority and Narrative in Early America," September 30, 2011
Invited Lectures
Duquesne University, October 2, 2023
Iowa State, Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH) Donald R. Benson Memorial Lecture, March 30, 2023
UNLV, Great Works Academic Certificate, February 15, 2023
English-Speaking Union of the United States, February 1, 2023
Berkshire County Historical Society at Herman Melville's Arrowhead, June 22, 2022
Penn State Alumni Association Speaker Series, May 24, 2022
Spoleto Festival USA, April 21, 2022
Villanova University, Falvey Memorial Library, April 20, 2022
University of Toronto, February 11, 2022
UC Santa Barbara, April 22, 2021
University of Illinois, March 26, 2021
Maryland Center for History and Culture, March 10, 2021
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Annual Lecture in Literature and Cultural Theory for 2019-20, February 25, 2021
Mystic Seaport Museum, Sailor Made exhibition talk, October 7, 2020
The University of Edinburgh, February 26, 2020
Cooper Union, New York, November 4, 2019
The Coasts, Climates, the Humanities, and the Environment Consortium (CCHEC), Mellon Foundation, National Humanities Center, September 26, 2019
University of Gothenburg, Sweden, May 17, 2019
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, May 15, 2019
The Seedbox, Linköping University, Sweden, May 9, 2019
University of Washington, March 1, 2019
Weber World Café, Heidelberg, Germany, October 2018
German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., May 17, 2018
University of Alberta, May 5, 2018
University of North Florida, May 1, 2018
Northwestern University, November 13, 2017
Yale University, October 13, 2017
CUNY Graduate Center, May 5, 2016
Columbia University, April 15, 2016
University of Michigan, November 12, 2015
Bayreuth University, Bayreuth, Germany, October 23, 2015
Baylor University, April 24, 2015
Bowdoin College, March 2, 2015
University of Pennsylvania, February 24, 2015
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, December 5, 2014
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, November 25, 2014
University of Sussex, November 11, 2014
University of Nottingham, November 10, 2014
Early American Literature and Material Texts Workshop, McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Library Company of Philadelphia, July 23, 2014
University of Oxford, May 30-31, 2014
University of Miami, March 27, 2014
Rice University, January 24, 2014
Pomona College, November 11, 2013
UC Irvine, May 21, 2013
Oakland University, March 18, 2013
CUNY Graduate Center, November 30, 2012
Princeton University, November 7, 2012
University of Massachusetts-Boston, November 1, 2012
University of Delaware English Roundtable, May 3, 2012
University of Delaware History Workshop, February 28, 2012
CSUS and F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series, University of Toronto Centre for the Book and the Centre for the Study of the United States, November 17, 2011
University of South Carolina, November 10, 2011
Freibert/Wittreich Symposium and Wittreich Symposium-Graduate Workshop on Archival Research, University of Louisville, November 3-4, 2011
Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Lecture/Seminar Series, University of Rhode Island, April 21, 2011
UCLA, Americanist Research Colloquium, January 27, 2011
Rutgers University, "Where is American Literary Studies Now? Transnational Paradigms Across Historical Periods," November 12, 2010
Cornell University, Americanist Reading Group, November 4, 2010
New York Metro American Studies Association, New York, October 27, 2010
University of Kentucky, October 18, 2010
University of Maryland, Local Americanists Lecture Series, September 24, 2010
UC Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, April 22, 2010
Harvard American Literature Colloquium, Cambridge, MA, October 22, 2008
Plenary Speaker, Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, June 16-22, 2008
Unauthorized States, Notre Dame, April 4-5, 2008
American Literature Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, November 2003
C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College, MD, March 2003
Book project on polar humanities research: Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in the Arctic and Antarctica
Book project on women's Robinsonades: Castaway
