Hester Blum

At Penn State I teach courses in nineteenth-century US literature and culture, oceanic and polar studies, material text studies and the history of the book, popular fiction, Herman Melville, and the environmental humanities. I direct the English Grad Futures initiative, which provides resources, advice, and workshops on the constellation of possibilities for English grads beyond tenure-line positions.

My edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, with a new introduction and notes, was published by Oxford World's Classics in 2022. My most recent monograph, The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, was published by Duke University Press in 2019 and was a finalist for the Ecocritical Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; an open access edition is available. My first book, The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (UNC Press, 2008), received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. I have also published a critical edition of Horrors of Slavery (1808), William Ray's Barbary captivity narrative (Rutgers UP, 2008). I have edited a special issue of Atlantic Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies as well as a volume of essays entitled Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). I contribute frequently to Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

I participated in an Arctic climate change expedition in 2019; a documentary made of our Northwest Passage Project is streaming. I also joined the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving nineteenth-century wooden whaleship; traveled to Antarctica in 2022 with the Penn State Alumni Association; and returned to the Arctic in an expedition to Svalbard with The Arctic Circle in 2022.