Melville Society Panels at MLA 2026
The Melville Society is submitting one panel to the 2026 Modern Language Association annual convention, which will be held in Toronto, January 8-11, 2026.
See the panel description and roster, below, and watch this space for an announcement of the conference program when it’s released!
Thermal Melville
“Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale!,” Ishmael enjoins in Moby-Dick, “Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.” Today, Ishmael’s dream of thermal independence for both human and nonhuman life is threatened by an overheated planet that is increasing the earth’s temperature to dangerous levels, warming oceans, melting sea ice, scorching the land, producing hotter summers and colder winters. Global warming thus makes visible what media theorist Nicole Starosielski has recently described as “zones of thermal privilege and thermal harm” and threatens, for example, what the Inuk writer Sheila Watt-Cloutier has called “the right to be cold.”
Melville’s writings are attuned to a variety of thermal contexts and thermal experiences. He traveled to and wrote about some of the warmest climates on earth; his works also, as Hester Blum has shown, found their way to some of the coldest. This panel invites papers that consider hot and cold in Melville’s writings, especially papers that are attuned to the social and cultural dimensions of temperature, to the politics of thermal exposure, to thermo-aesthetics and thermo-power, to the affects of heat transfer, to climate change, and to overlooked histories of temperature.
Organizer/Presider:
Jeffrey Insko (Oakland U)
Panelists:
Paul B. Downes (U of Toronto)
Grace King (Penn State U, University Park)
Matthew Rebhorn (James Madison U)
Gabriel Briex (U of Toronto)
For more details on the 2026 MLA convention, see https://www.mla.org/Events/2026-MLA-Convention
