“The bunks looked clean, simple, graceful, light. I tried to imagine sleeping in one. For the next ten weeks I tried to imagine sleeping in one. Those bunks looked hard.”
Eighty-five individuals from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds sailed aboard the ship and participated in an unprecedented public-history project, using their own perspectives and talents to document their experiences. Meet the Voyagers »
Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar and Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She hopes to bring the experience of the 38th Voyage back into the classroom, not only to make Melville’s books and poems come to life, but also to reflect on how we think about literacy in different media. In particular, she is interested in Melville’s observations of wind and weather as information media, bearing messages as texts in other media do and calling on refined reading skills.
