Seven Melville scholars from six different states who comprise the Melville Society Cultural Project will serve as principal faculty of the Institute, joined by an experienced high school English teacher.

• Mary K. Bercaw Edwards (University of Connecticut), Institute co-director

• Wyn Kelley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Institute co-director

• Timothy Marr (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Institute co-director

• Jennifer Baker (New York University)

• Tony McGowan (United States Military Academy West Point)

• Chris Sten (George Washington University)

• Robert K. Wallace (Northern Kentucky University)

Jennifer J. Baker
Jennifer J. Baker is Associate Professor of English at New York University, where she specializes in 18th- and 19th-century American literature, culture, and intellectual history. She is the author of Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America as well as articles on Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson, among others, and she is currently completing a book on mid-19th-century American literature and the life sciences. In 2007, Baker designed and taught a five-part continuing education series on Moby-Dick at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and in 2019 she co-organized the International Melville Conference in New York City to commemorate the bicentennial of Melville’s birth. She has been a member of the Melville Society Cultural Project since 2006 and enjoys helping with Melville-related programming at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Timothy Marr
Timothy Marr is a Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 2000. He grew up on a high school campus in Massachusetts and taught social studies and English in California, Connecticut, Australia, and Pakistan—where he became interested in the history of how Americans viewed the difference of Islam while teaching Moby-Dick during the Russian phase of the war in Afghanistan. His book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (2006) was born as a Melville project during a 1989 NEH Summer Seminar for Teachers on Moby-Dick in Santa Barbara. He is a co-editor (with another Institute co-director) of Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick (2006) and has published on Melville in The Historical Guide to Herman Melville, Melville and Women, “This Mighty Convulsion”: Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War, the third Norton Critical edition of Moby-Dick, New Companions to Herman Melville published by Wiley-Blackwell and Cambridge, and the journal Leviathan.

Tony McGowan
Tony McGowan is Associate Professor of English at West Point, where he has taught since 2000. But he began teaching in 1988 at a vocational public high school in Hell’s Kitchen, NY, before attending NYU, where he studied American literature, critical theory, and visual culture. He first joined The Melville Society for their 4th international conference, Melville and the Pacific, in Lahaina, Maui, in 2003. In 2006 he edited a collection of Melville’s Classic Critical Reviews for Harold Bloom’s Editions. He has served as Treasurer and Executive Secretary for The Melville Society, published essays and reviews in Leviathan (and in edited collections), served as lead contributing editor for an edition of Chapman’s translation of the Iliad at Melville’s Marginalia Online, and, with Timothy Marr, co-edited the History Research Group for the Melville Electronic Library. In 2019, with Jennifer Baker, he co-organized Melville’s Origins, the 12th International Melville Conference in NYC, which commemorated the bicentennial of Melville’s birth. He has several recent publications, including “Lyric Anonymity in Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces” in A New Companion to Herman Melville (Blackwell, 2022), and “Reification Poetics in the Late Poetry of Whitman and Melville,” in American Studies Over Seas. (Peter Lang, 2022)—a two-volume edition of essays that he also co-edited. In the summer of 2025, he will “splice hands” with Wyn Kelley and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards to co-chair the 14th International Melville Conference at Mystic Seaport Museum and New Bedford. Tony’s ongoing fascination with Melville in the visual arts was deepened by his 2013 participation in an NEH Summer Institute on The Visual Culture of the American Civil War. He is currently refining his Melville-centered manuscript for a book on American literary portraiture.

Christopher Sten
Chris Sten’s interest in Melville started in college and has continued throughout his career as a teacher and scholar.  The editor of Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (1992) and author of Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel (1996), he has recently published a co-edited collection of essays (with Tyler Hoffman), titled “This Mighty Convulsion”: Melville and Whitman Write the Civil War (Iowa 2019) and a study of embodiment, Melville’s Other Lives: Bodies on Trial in The Piazza Tales (Virginia 2022).   Like his colleagues in the Melville Society Cultural Project, he has broad interests in Melville’s transnationalism, multiculturalism, and treatment of race, gender, age, and class and has done work on trauma and the question of animal intelligence in Melville’s novel as well.  In teaching Moby-Dick to many students over the years at George Washington University, he has developed a method of close reading, daily writing, and regular feedback to help students gain confidence in their critical powers and demonstrate their growing command of this incomparably rich and many-layered whaling story.

Robert K. Wallace
Robert K. Wallace is Regents Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. His books on Melville include Melville and Turner (1992), Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick (2007), Douglass and Melville (2005), Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick: A Grand Opera for the Twenty-First Century (2013), and Fast Fish and Loose Fish: NKU Students Make Moby-Dick Art (2015). Wallace is a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (2001) and has supervised its art acquisition program. He has taught courses in Melville and the Arts at NKU since 1994, and artwork created by his undergraduate students has been widely exhibited. Wallace is the leading authority on the 400 prints and engravings he has discovered from Melville’s personal collection. He is also a leading authority on contemporary responses to Moby-Dick in the visual and performing arts. He has curated exhibitions on Melville and Turner, The Art of Seeing Whales, and Moby-Dick-art by contemporary artists from Frank Stella to Matt Kish. Wallace was a faculty leader of the NEH Seminar for School Teachers in New Bedford in 2001 and has published several essays on teaching Moby-Dick. Wallace’s essay on “Moby-Dick and the Arts in the Early Twenty-First Century” is featured in the third edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2017). His website Melville’s Print Collection Online is posted on the Digital Resources page of the Melville Society website and his co-authored essay with Samuel Otter appears in Leviathan’s special issue on Digital Humanities (June 2023).

Institute Project Manager

Victoria Hughes
Victoria Hughes is the Associate Director of Museum Learning at the New Bedford Whaling Museum where she develops and manages all aspects of the museum’s school programs and supervises the Museum Learning team and volunteer corps. She has over 25 years’ experience working in museum education and is passionate about place-based learning and engaging students with primary sources and museum collections. While at the Vermont Historical Society, Victoria created and co-taught a summer graduate class called Old Documents, New Technology: Integrating Primary Sources, Tech Tools, and the Common Core. As Project Manager, she will guide the on-site administration of the Institute at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and facilitate the work of Institute participants, co-directors, and faculty.