2024 Hennig Cohen Prize Award
The Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize Committee has selected its recipient for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville published in 2024. The winner is Geoffrey R. Kirsch his essay “Piercing the Corporate Whale: Agents, Principals, and the Personified Impersonal in Moby-Dick,” published in Leviathan, vol. 26, no. 3, pp.55-68.
The award was founded in 1998 in honor of Hennig Cohen (1919–1996), an early member of the Society and a dedicated teacher, scholar, and modern editor of Herman Melville's works. The award is typically made in the year after the article or chapter was published.
The Hennig Cohen Prize Committee comments on this year’s winner:
The committee easily decided to name Geoffrey R. Kirsch the winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best essay published in 2024. “Piercing the Corporate Whale” offers a reading of Moby-Dick that is as compelling as it is original. By interconnecting Ahab’s oft-quoted “strike through the mask” speech with Jacksonian antipathy toward the “Monster Bank” of the U.S., the essay’s connections illuminate the meanings of “agent” and “principal” for Melville and the world he lived in. Its discussion shifts seamlessly from historical parallels, to contemporary legal cases, to close readings of stock market metaphors in Melville’s novel, while elaborating multiple complementary valences of “personhood.” The essay’s impressive insight is matched by its remarkable distillation, with a beautifully clear and succinct writerly voice.
Nominations, including self-nominations, for the 2025 Hennig Cohen Prize should be sent to hennigcohenprize@gmail.com by Sept. 15, 2026. The nominated essay, article, or book chapter should have been published in 2025.
