All Astir

Abstract

A s this issue of Leviathan goes to press, we eagerly anticipate the Society’s Eighth International Conference, “Melville and Rome: Empire—Democracy—Belief—Art,” which will be held at the University of Rome and the Center for American Studies. More than one hundred scholars from over twenty nations will be participating. Dennis Berthold, Gordon Poole, and Leslie Marmon Silko are the keynote speakers. We will report on the conference in our March 2012 issue. Plans are coalescing for the next international Society conference, “Melville and Whitman,” to be held in June 2013 in Washington, D. C. This gathering will focus on the Civil War experiences of the two writers, while also inviting presentations on a range of other topics. The conference comes at the midpoint of the Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations taking place between 2011 and 2015. The Melville Society’s associate secretary Joseph Fruscione, Tyler Hoffman (Rutgers-Camden University), Martin Murray (founder of the Washington Friends of Walt Whitman), and Melville Society Cultural Project co-chair Christopher Sten are organizing the events, and they will issue a call for papers soon. Leading up to the Washington conference, Fruscione and Hoffman, along with Elizabeth Petrino of the Emily Dickinson Society, will be presiding over a conversation by distinguished scholars on a panel at the 2012 MLA conference in Seattle, titled “New Approaches to Civil War Poetry: Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville.” The next development meeting for the Melville Electronic Library (MELCamp3) will take place on October 13–15 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Cosponsored by HyperStudio, the digital humanities lab for Comparative Media Studies at MIT, the program’s opening night, open to the public, will be keynoted by MEL director John Bryant who will speak on “Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human.” The following day’s focus will be on new developments in TextLab and HyperStudio’s plans for “Melville Remix,” a digital workspace conceived by associate director Wyn Kelley in which readers, students, scholars, and editors may view and manipulate literary texts with their sources and adaptations in different media. Bryant visited MIT last fall to discuss developing this project. HyperStudio’s experience in designing humanities programs for the MIT classroom gives them expertise in many forms of digital visualization, especially timelines and mapping, that would be useful to MEL. Having the meeting at MIT will allow MEL and HyperStudio to plan for the future and learn from each other’s work. Readers