Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel’s unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. The book asks many questions: What higher (or lower) powers are at play in the world? How do we come to knowledge? What do humans owe one another? What does a “heart-stricken moose” sound like? Is that really how sperm whales got their name?

Listen in as scholars Hester Blum and Brian Yothers converse about this Great(est?) American Novel and make a case for Herman Melville as the most important contemporary writer, even on his 207th birthday. This event welcomes first-time Melville readers and Moby-Dick obsessives alike, and discussion will range from the novel’s most thunderous, epic heights to its quirkiest, crudest jokes.

About the panelists: Hester Blum is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of several books about sailors’ literary culture and the editor of the Oxford edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (2022).  She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world’s last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed. She also co-hosts the Exploring Moby-Dick podcast with actor and writer Rob Delaney; it begins streaming on July 30.

Brian Yothers is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Saint Louis University. Among other books, he is the author of Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career (Northwestern, 2015), Melville's Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America's Most Elusive Author (Camden House, 2011), and Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now (Camden House, 2023) and editor with Jonathan A. Cook of Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion (Northwestern, 2017) and with Harold K. Bush of Above the American Renaissance (2018). From 2020-2025 he served as Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.