Please join us for a Print Culture double-header! We’ll hear talks by Dr. Hester Blum and Dr. Graham Thompson, who will also engage in a public conversation and take questions from the audience. They will explore the unexpected role played in polar expeditions by private publishing and what we might call “extreme printing,” and the extensive role played in American authorship and literature by magazines.

Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is a leading expert on 19th-century US literature and culture, oceanic studies, print culture, popular fiction, and Herman Melville. Her book The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008), received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award and she is at work on a new book about the print culture of polar exploration. She is a founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century, and has been Associate Director of the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and Director of the Center for American Literary Studies. In 2015 she will be the President of the Melville Society.

Graham Thompson is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is a leading expert on Melville, 19th-century US literature, and print culture. He is currently finishing a book about Melville and American magazines, which presses Melville back into the practicalities of magazine writing and the publishing life in which he was once rooted and brings the magazines themselves to life as important cultural forms. His other books are American Culture in the 1980s (2007), The Business of America: the Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation (2004) and Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature (2003).