As part of the 175th anniversary celebrations for Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, IASH alumna Prof. Hester Blum is presenting a 21-episode podcast alongside actor and writer Rob Delaney, for Exploring the Classics.
Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick is a monumental tale of adventure, observation, and obsession. Following narrator Ishmael as he boards the Pequot, a whaling ship with obsessive and tortured Captain Ahab at the helm, this story is equal parts comedy as it is tragedy. Along the journey, Melville weaves together a thrilling sea narrative, encyclopedic passages on science, and meditations on nature and human nature. Much more than a story of revenge, Moby-Dick is a profound examination of humanity and our desire to understand (or conversely, dominate) the natural world.
Hester is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of 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. In 2020, she visited IASH as an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow, working on Ice Ages, which explored the temporalities of ice in an epoch of anthropogenic climate change. It drew from an Arctic expedition she joined in 2019, and contemplated the extra‐human timescales and far-reaching social and intellectual demands of climate change, while offering new approaches to research in the humanities and sciences alike.
You can find out more at https://exploringthegreats.com/moby-dick