All Astir

Abstract

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The Eleventh International Melville Conference, "Melville's Crossings," held at King's College London on June 27–30, 2017, was a resounding success. Janet Floyd, Wyn Kelley, and above all Edward Sugden did a superb job of organizing the conference. In this issue of Leviathan, we are honored to include the plenary addresses of Hester Blum and Anna Brickhouse. We also present President Arimichi Makino's address, five conference reports, and a photo gallery. (More photos are available under the "Photos" tab on the Melville Society website at <http://melvillesociety.org/>.) Click for larger view View full resolution Statue in the entrance hall of King's College London holding the "Melville's Crossings" conference program. Photo courtesy of Colin Dewey. [End Page 69] We wish to thank the plenary speakers for their wonderful talks; President Makino for his address; Søren Frank, Wyn Kelley, Kathryn Mudgett, James Noel, and Caitlin Smith Oyekole for their conference reports; and Hester Blum, Colin Dewey, Maryse Jayasuriya, Shoko Tsuji, and Brian Yothers for their photography. The Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize committee is very pleased to announce that this year's Hennig Cohen Prize for the best article, book chapter, or essay on Herman Melville goes to Matthew Knip for "Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville's Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk" in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62.2 (2016): 355–414. The committee writes in praise of Knip's article: Knip reconsiders Melville's conceptions of desire and community on the basis of a study of the diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, an American sailor whose writings extensively describe the sexual practices of working-class sailors in the 1850s. Through incisive readings of Typee, White-Jacket, Billy Budd, and "John Marr," Knip critiques accounts of Melville that rely on "anachronistically heterosexualized sailors" or present homoerotic desire as either repressed or expressed only privately. Knip argues that Melville's portrayals of homosocial desire "as a binding paradisiacal glue" are rooted not only in his powerful imagination, but also and crucially in his inhabitation of seafaring communities in which social masturbation and sex between men were often accepted as matters of course that did not constitute sexual identity. Knip's essay is an outstanding work of cultural history and a compelling contribution to our understanding of Melville's social thought. In addition, the Hennig Cohen Prize Committee has decided to award an Honorable Mention to Kelly Ross for "Babo's Heterochronic Creativity" in Levia-than 18.1 (March 2016): 5–21. Congratulations to Matthew Knip and Kelly Ross! Shortly after the conference, the first webpage on Herman Melville in Denmark went live: Herman Melville: Værk, liv og forskning (<http://melville.dk/>). Søren Frank, whose conference report is included in this issue, writes: "I am aware that most of you may have some slight difficulties in reading Danish, but I nevertheless thought that you would all appreciate such good news concerning the global promotion of Melville's works. Work on the webpage was initiated by me in 2015 when I taught a class on Melville, and back then all the students in my class contributed one way or the other to the webpage. Since then, three of the students and myself have continued to work on the site." The site was officially launched on August 18, 2017, with a reception at Comparative Literature, Southern Denmark University. Frank adds: "who knows, perhaps at some point some of us and/or others may get to establishing a Danish Melville Society (no promises, though)." [End Page 70] In another instance of Melville's global popularity, Gordon Poole, one of the co-directors of the 2011 Rome conference, gave a talk and reading of Melville's poetry as part of a five-year project entitled "MOBY DICK: avventure, divagazioni e altre strategie sul tema di Melville" ("Moby-Dick: adventures, digressions, and other strategies on the theme of Melville"). Organized by Giovanni Andrea Semerano and Luigi Francini, the event takes place over a five-year period, 2016–2021, in Tuscania, an hour's drive north of Rome, Italy. It includes research, exhibitions, retrospectives...