Hopkins Press Podcast 4.8: Leviathan Special Issue: Melville's Queer Afterlives

On today’s episode we’re talking with the guest editors of a forthcoming issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. These three editors, Jordan Alexander Stein, Dana Seitler, and Adam Fales have put together a riveting collection of essays exploring what they call Melville's Queer Afterlives — scholarship on the ways Herman Melville’s work has influenced queer studies today.

This is an epic conversation that includes mentions of Maurice Sendak and John Ashbery and, believe it or not, Gilbert Gottfried.

A content warning: this episode contains some senstive content and may not be suitable for all listeners. Listener discretion is advised. 

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Jordan Alexander Stein investigates how aspects of social identities (including race, sexuality, gender, and religion) inflect the material practices associated with literary production (including reading, printing, editing, and archiving). These interests shape his prize-winning co-edited collection, Early African American Print Culture (Penn, 2012), and his recent monograph, When Novels Were Books (Harvard, 2020).

Dana Seitler is Professor of English and the director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literatures and cultures, queer theory and sexuality studies, feminist theory, cultural studies of science, visual culture, and aesthetics.

Adam Fales studies nineteenth-century US literature, legal history, and literary theory. He also writes about contemporary literature and culture for a range of publications including Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, and Full Stop. He is currently working on his first book project, a literary history of inheritance in the nineteenth-century United States.