A. E. Doyle
Doyle is an elementary school teacher at Shelby Traditional Academy in Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky. She has Master’s degrees in Education, is an alumna of the Munson Institute for American Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport, and is a Google Educator specializing in maps, sites, and Earth applications. While at Munson, Doyle researched the rise of passenger shipping in dual-purpose steamships out of the Caribbean and the educational outreach programs of the United Fruit Company. Doyle brought her new friend, Flat Stanley Clayton Morgan, on the 38th Voyage and mapped their activities for students back home.
Thackray is a professional book and print artist who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has participated in national and international artist residencies, including the recent completion of a year-long residency at the Center for Book Arts in New York, a 2013 residency in the High Arctic as part of the Arctic Circle Program, and an upcoming residency at The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York.
Anne DiMonti is Director of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island Environmental Education Center. She has been a marine biologist, educator, and sailor for more than 30 years. DiMonti is active on several environmental boards and committees, and she enjoys affiliations with Rhode Island Natural History Survey’s Board of Directors, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium Education Committee, and Roger Williams University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. She once worked as a Marine Mammal Observer during the Rhode Island Jamestown Bridge Demolition, and at the Roger Williams Park Zoo, Save the Bay, and Mystic Aquarium.
Manning has been the Art teacher at St. Mary’s School for the Deaf for 30 years. Her love of sailing has given her the opportunity to race boats on both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, help to found a junior racing program in her area. In 2001, after accepting an invitation to sail as a guest crew member on the U.S. Brig Niagara in Erie, PA., Manning fell in love with square-rigged ships. She has sailed on all five Great Lakes aboard Niagara and participated in numerous port visits. She has also sailed aboard the German sail training vessel Roald Amundsen. Since 2009 Manning has been active with the Mystic Seaport PILOTS Program.
Hundahl is an artist and museum professional who has spent her entire life on or near the ocean. She has exhibited her artwork in numerous venues over the years, and has also worked as an art teacher. Currently, Hundahl is the Outreach and Education Coordinator for the Marblehead Museum. She received her B.A. in Art History from Middlebury College, and a diploma in Painting and Printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Leahy is a 3rd grade teacher and Department Head at Shady Hill School, where she has been for almost 30 years. She received her B.A. in Environmental Biology from Middlebury College, and her M. Ed. from Tufts University. Leahy embodies the power of experiential learning by implementing a year-long study of whales and whaling, which includes a mock whaling voyage around the globe. Students become familiar with not only the mechanics of whaling, but also the social and political climate of the time, the customs and practices of other whaling cultures, and the diversity aboard the New England ships.
Fitzgerald has a M.A. in Life Writing from the University of East Anglia, England, and a Masters in Science Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand, focusing on Natural History Documentary Film Making. She has edited two books about early New Zealand: Letters from the Bay of Islands: Story of Marianne Williams (2004) and Te Wiremu: Henry Williams: Early Years in the North (2011). She has also taught English as a Second Language in New Zealand and in Germany.
Charles Foy received his Ph.D. in History from Rutgers in 2008 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. Foy’s area of expertise is the 18th-century Black Atlantic. Foy’s work includes the development of the 
Wenc is a writer, historian, museum consultant, and editor. She has worked on museum and public history projects for the National Park Service, Harvard University Libraries, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and has published journalism, history, and creative nonfiction. Wenc received her B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins College, and her M.A. in the History of Science from Harvard University.
Leonard is adjunct faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an artist, filmmaker, and a member of the Shinnecock Nation of Long Island, New York.
Baptista is a Portuguese-American writer, literary scholar, and English Instructor at Convent of the Sacred Heart School in Greenwich, Connecticut. Prior to working at CSH, she taught at Fordham University where she received her Ph.D. in English, with a focus on Modern American Literature.
Payne is a professor of English and Environmental Sciences at SUNY Oneonta and a Ph.D. graduate of SUNY Buffalo. While his academic work concentrates on American literary environmentalism, his creative work “centers on human perspectives on nature and our relation to the environment.”
Dante Francomano recently graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied composition under Peter Hamlin and Su Lian Tan and received a B.A. in Music. In the fall Francomano will begin a Ph.D. at Purdue University where he will be working at the Center for Global Soundscapes.
Grant spent more than 20 years with the Sandy Hook Ocean Institute at Brookdale Community College. During his tenure he served as Director, Teacher and Adjunct Professor where he brought the mysteries and discoveries of climate, earth, environmental, and related STEM science programs to students of all ages. He currently works as Climate Interpretation Coordinator for the American Littoral Society. “Free” time frequently finds him aboard research vessels around the world doing field work and preparing it for the classroom. Grant has studied whales and whaling and received the USEPA Environmental Quality Award for his work developing marine science programs.
Edward Baker is the Executive Director of the New London County Historical Society in New London, Connecticut. In addition to a B.A. in History and a M.S. in Recreation, Baker has more than 30 years of experience in the museum field, including time as the Associate Director of Education and Interpretation at Mystic Seaport. His interest is in bringing forward the important role of sperm whale oil in enabling the Industrial Revolution, and his experience aboard the Charles W. Morgan will coincide with an exhibit, “Whaling Out of New London,” that he is creating for the New London County Historical Society at the Shaw Mansion.
Schultz is a dedicated advocate for the arts and the environment. She is retired from the University of Kansas English Department, and continues to write about the people and the places she loves. She has published two scholarly books on Melville: Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (1995)—which inspired a recent exhibit titled “Imagining Moby” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum—and, as co-editor, Melville and Women (2006). Schultz has also published four books of poetry, a memoir, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.
Stedall recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge entitled “Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Transatlantic Sea Literature, 1797-1924.” She holds an M.Phil. in American Literature, also from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Corpus Christi College in Oxford. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor on the Oxford English Dictionary.
Kambic is a historical archaeologist studying how diversity in the whaling industry shaped modern American ideas of citizenship and identity. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University and currently serves as a park ranger at the Boston African American National Historic Site.
Sanborn is a high school science teacher at South Kent School, and a state and regional representative on Environmental Education boards for Connecticut and New England. She also identifies as an Environmental Educator with a particular interest in cultural and economic implications and their relationship with environmental action. Sanborn is the daughter of an immigrant from the Azores and has always been fascinated with whaling tradition and Portuguese culture. She enjoys traditional blacksmithing as an artist and teacher. She received her B.A. in Environmental Education from Colby College.
Emily Schimelman has been teaching 4
Evan Turk is an illustrator and animator living in New York City. He graduated from Parsons and continued his training at Dalvero Academy. Turk’s projects have included documenting the restoration of the Charles W. Morgan and an award-winning animation “Patterns,” on the cultural history and future of the Morgan, which is on display at Mystic Seaport. His work is also included in the exhibit 
Wikfors holds a Ph.D. in marine biology, with a focus on marine phytoplankton, which he applies to his position as Supervisor Research Fisheries Biologist with the Northeast Fisheries Center of the National Marine Fisheries Service. His interest in the 38th Voyage, however, focuses less on his scientific background but more on his more than four decades as a composer and performer of traditional folk music from cultures around the world. He has written more than 200 songs and currently plays throughout New England with different bands, performing a variety of music on several instruments, from country to contra dance. In particular, Wikfors founded “Walkingwood Mandolin Quartet” in 2001 and their first CD came out in 2010.
G. L. “Ger” Tysk is a novelist, maritime writer, and photographer. Her work focuses on early American whaling and its impact on globalization, 19th century colonialism, and Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant culture. She is the author of the novels The Sea-God at Sunrise and Paradise, inspired by John Manjiro’s story. Tysk has sailed square-rigged tall ships with Sea Education Association and also with Mystic Seaport aboard the historic whaleship Charles W. Morgan. She lives in Boston.
Hester Blum is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State University, where she specializes in 19th-century American Literature and Oceanic Studies—the study of literary and cultural circulations defined by sea routes and flows rather than by political or terrestrial boundaries.
Carr knows the Charles W. Morgan well. As a boy he stood on her deck as she was floated down the river after her first major restoration in Mystic. He worked as a Mystic Seaport interpreter and demonstration squad member during his high school and college years, and now, as an ethnographer, historian, educator, and sea music scholar and performer, he returns to the ship regularly as a participant in the Museum’s annual Sea Music Festival. Carr is currently Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at UNC Greensboro, having earned his Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara.
Ferguson is manager, curator, and interpreter at the Butler Point Whaling Museum, in Mangonui, New Zealand. At the heart of this historic precinct is a whaling museum that her family started 40 years ago and houses artifacts from American and Maori whalers, as well as a beautifully restored 1840s homestead built by an English whaler. Ferguson is currently designing a new exhibit titled “Whaling Today,” highlighting current scientific research, whale strandings, whale rescue, and marine mammal conservation.
Jason Mancini is the Director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Connecticut College. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Connecticut. He also heads the 
Raupp is a Ph.D. student and research fellow in marine archaeology at Finders University in South Australia. His dissertation focuses on the industrial operations of 19th-century whaleships and the material culture associated with American whalers wrecked in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (Northwestern Hawaiian Islands).
After college, life at sea beckoned. Bolster spent years sailing and was licensed by the United States Coast Guard as Master of Motor, Steam & Sail vessels, 200 gross tons, all Oceans. Eventually he came ashore to a history faculty position at the University of New Hampshire.
Jim Taylor retired in 2003 from his career as a school principal. He then pursued his interest in African American history and became a historical interpreter who portrayed a slave who was a cooper with Historic Hudson Valley at the Philipsburg Manor farm and mills. While there, Taylor demonstrated bucket and barrel making to the public and assisted a group of teenagers in the building of a period boat that would have been used by farmers to bring grain via the Hudson River to the mills. This sparked an interest in boat building, and he founded the Peekskill Boatworks in 2009. Since then he has worked with more than 200 teens, both afterschool and in the summer, and has built approximately 14 boats, ranging from a 12-foot Bevin’s skiff to a 22-foot St. Ayles racing skiff. In addition to boat building, Taylor continues to portray a slave who tells the story of slavery in the North at numerous school and historical events throughout the year.
DiMartino is a Mystic, Connecticut-based poet and public historian with work published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Modern Haiku and Alimentum. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Licking the Spoon (Finishing Line Press) and Strange Girls (Little Red Tree Publishing). Her poems have appeared in several art exhibits, most recently Poetry of the Wild ~ Mystic, which was on display at Mystic Seaport and featured a poem from her next manuscript, Wood to Skin, which is about the 19th-century whaling industry, highlighting the career of the Charles W. Morgan.
Bryant is a professor in the Department of English at Hofstra University and is a Melville scholar currently working on a biography of the man entitled Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life. He is also the Founding Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (1990-2013). Bryant took the opportunity aboard the Charles W. Morgan to gain perspective on Melville’s experiences aboard the Acushnet, a whaler of the same vintage as the Morgan, and will use his new viewpoint to revise things he has already written and gain insight into upcoming chapters.
Pistell makes daily use of her MFA in non-fiction writing from Bennington as the Director of Writing at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. Her 38th Voyager project will take advantage of her experience as co-creator and host of the “Literary Disco Podcast” which brings serious literature into popular conversation and reviews it in a cultural context.
Karim Tiro holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves as a Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Xavier University. An accomplished scholar and writer, he has published on the Native peoples of southern New England, the War of 1812, and other topics.
Sheridan is an artist-naturalist with BFAs in Illustration and Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She focuses her work on animals – in life and death – and how they interact with the environment, other animals, and humans. She maintains her own taxidermy practice and has worked extensively at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard where she improved her knowledge of natural history. In 2013 Sheridan served as the youngest participant aboard the Antigua during a summer residency voyage for artists and scientists to Svalbard with the Arctic Circle Program.
Lafferty grew up on stories of New England, whaling, and her family’s ties to it. While aboard the Charles W. Morgan, she channeled her ancestor Marian Smith, navigator, photographer, and correspondent who sailed on numerous ships throughout the world at the turn of the 20th century with her whaling captain husband, Horace P. Smith. As a student at the George Washington University, Lafferty studied and wrote about the economics of the whaling industry and efforts to stop whaling on an international scale. Today, she is a self-employed editor and proofreader, handling projects ranging from environmental science and policy to U.S. history and geography.
Lesley Walker’s connection to the Charles W. Morgan reaches back to the late 19th century when her great-great-grandparents lived on isolated Sunday Island (now Raoul Is.) in the Pacific. In the early years, whaleships were their only connection to the outside world. She is currently working on a book about her ancestors’ experience. “The New Bedford whaling ships not only saved my ancestors’ lives when they were marooned and in danger of dying of starvation in 1870s but were a lifeline for them, providing stores, a whaleboat, human contact, essential supplies and news about the world on their intermittent visits to the island.”
Lucy Bellwood is a freelance illustrator and cartoonist. Since 2007 she has been an avid lover of sailing and tall ships, working as a deckhand aboard the 
Desy is a public historian with degrees from the College of the Holy Cross and George Washington University. Like Herman Melville, Desy’s maritime career began aboard a whaler, Mystic Seaport’s Charles W. Morgan, where she demonstrated climbing the rigging and setting sails for visitors. She was the research historian on the last Morgan restoration and today she is historian for USS Constitution, America’s “Ship of State.”
Wayss earned an M.A. in Creative Arts and Learning and is currently an art teacher at Our Sisters’ School in New Bedford and co-founder of the Music and Art Collaborative, Inc. Her inspiration often comes from her environment and her Portuguese heritage.“As an artist growing up, living and working in New England, I have always been drawn to the sea,” Wayss said. She inspires her students to use their surroundings—the sea, marine life, and harbors as subject matter. She holds middle school art exhibitions annually in New Bedford, as well as private exhibitions for her students.
Rigney is the author of In Pursuit of Giants: One Man’s Global Search for the Last of the Great Fish (Viking/Penguin, 2012). The book tells the story of Rigney’s five-year, 75,000-mile, ’round-the-world journey to encounter the great fish of the sea—marlin, bluefin tuna, and swordfish—and to explore the causes of their decline by more than 70 percent since 1950.
Bullard‘s connections to the Morgan run deep. Charles W. Morgan was his 4th-great grandfather. His family has strong ties to the whaling industry and the city of New Bedford, and they were instrumental in preserving the vessel when she ended her active whaling career in the 1920s.
Matthew Ecklund serves as Head Educator for Call of the Sea, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, Calif. focused on educating the public (particularly youth) about the ocean, marine mammals, and sailing. He is also an avid artist, with a particular interest in the evolution of scientific illustrations of whales. In 2009, he completed work on his Honors Art Exhibition at Macalester College, Ligatura Cetacea. In this exhibition, he “became a seventeenth-century illustrator,” producing “fifty quill and ink drawings of whales bound in lines.”
Owen is a contemporary artist and illustrator from Providence, Rhode Island. After many years of creating oil paintings based on popular culture and Americana, he recently began making pen-and-ink drawings of boats and ships, with a particular interest in the rigging of these vessels. Wooden boats, both large and small, now populate his drawings as well as his imagination. Owen has shown his work in New York, Los Angeles, and Providence and his paintings are in several public and private collections, including the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and Fidelity Investments’ corporate collection.
Dyer has 20 years of experience as a whaling curator, librarian, and maritime historian at the Kendall and New Bedford Whaling Museums. His exhibitions and publications have contributed to a better public understanding of whaling history and the artistry of both practical and decorative objects. His upcoming book The Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt explores how whalemen illustrated the craft of whaling in journals, logbooks, painting, and scrimshaw.
Mike Whitney is an Associate Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. He is an NSF CAREER award winner, with expertise in the physical oceanography of estuaries and continental shelves.
Moon is the Assistant Director of Education for Adult Programs at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Museum Studies at the Harvard University Extension School.
Mike Bancroft holds a United States Coast Guard 100-ton Master license and is a Naval Architect with more than 40 years of offshore sailing and sea service. A visit to Mystic Seaport at the age of 14 changed Bancroft’s life forever and inspired him to dedicate his life to ship design, construction, and voyaging.
Mike Vogel is a writer, historian, sailor, and keeper of the 1833 Buffalo lighthouse—one of the oldest lighthouses on the Great Lakes. He has sailed on the Sk/S Christian Radich of Norway and the USCGC Eagle and is the author of several maritime books including Echoes in the Mist and Lighthouses.
Krejci holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he teaches courses in music history and Alaska Native music. His research combines the disciplines of music and anthropology and examines musicultural change and early musical processes of globalization among indigenous cultures of northern Alaska and northwestern Canada during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. He has also done fieldwork focusing on the state of present-day indigenous musical forms and the musical impact of early commercial whaling along the Arctic coast.
Whittemore said, “The chance to see New Bedford harbor, coming in…on a whaling vessel is an opportunity of a lifetime for one like me whose blood lines run in the rigging.” Whittemore is Herman Melville’s great-great-grandson and brings not only a familial connection, but a real concern for the ocean environment and its role in sustainability for all species. He studied English at Harvard as an undergraduate and earned his M.Div. at the Harvard Divinity School. Whittemore regards the Charles W. Morgan as an “instrument of instruction” with potential to bring attention to important contemporary issues as well as connections to the whaling industry as an example of American industrial fervor in the 19th century.
Gilbert is currently pursuing her Master of Environmental Management degree at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Raised in a Quaker family, which can trace its roots back to the original settlers of America, she is eager to explore the historic connection between the Quaker community and the whaling empire they built.
French has spent much of his life scanning the heavens. He does his stargazing as Wellesley College’s Dean of Academic Affairs, Professor of Astronomy, and Director of Whitin Observatory. He also serves as a science team leader of NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn. French challenges his students to find “our place in space and time.” A lover of sailing and whales, he looks forward to a chance to “spend the entire summer (re)reading Moby-Dick, Shakespeare’s plays, the philosophy of science, and eventually all of Simenon’s mysteries in French.”
In 1981, the New Bedford native interviewed his great-uncle Jacinto Costa about his experiences as a seaman on the Charles W. Morgan’s 35th voyage in 1918. “It struck me how little he worried about his safety in what was a challenging and often treacherous work environment.” Burbank traveled to Mystic Seaport to see the logbook of that voyage, awed to hold it in his hands. Little did he know that more than 30 years later he himself would sail on the Morgan’s 38th Voyage. Burbank is now a communications professional, journalist, editor, and photographer specializing in outdoor adventure. His work has been published in many publications including The Boston Globe, Backpacker Magazine, Appalachia, and Yankee Magazine.
Batchelor is an Associate Professor of Modern British History at Georgia Southern University. He has a strong interest in cultural exchange and public history and has used various means, including films, websites, art installation and even a board game, to reach a broader public.
An English professor at Northern Kentucky University, Robert Wallace is passionate about Moby-Dick and about art. He has published four books on Melville and curated a variety of art exhibitions that respond to Melville’s work and to the natural world. He has also spent time as a deckhand on a tugboat in Puget Sound and has researched Makah whaling first-hand.
Reed is a Social Studies teacher at Lamoille Union High School in Hyde Park, Vermont, and wrote her master’s thesis on bringing journal writing into the social studies classroom. In 2013 Reed earned the Vermont Ignite Award as one of Vermont’s top educators using technology in the classroom to foster enthusiasm for learning.
Talpey has been teaching marine science at Branford High School in Branford, Connecticut, for nine years. She has independently designed and developed the marine biology curriculum. Talpey received her B.S. in marine biology from the University of Rhode Island, and her M.S. in biology from Southern Connecticut State University. She participated in a professional development program at Mystic Seaport about the changing perceptions of whales over time, and implemented a whaling unit that was showcased during a recent Educators’ Weekend at Mystic Seaport.
Svati Narula is a journalist at The Atlantic magazine and a recent graduate of Dartmouth College and the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program. Her writing covers a wide range of topics, but she strives to communicate with the public about the ocean by frequently writing stories that focus on shipwrecks, fisheries, marine ecology, and oceanography.
Sahl is an English and ESL teacher in Westbrook, Connecticut. He spent several years as a videographer out of Provincetown, documenting whale watches and studying whale behavior and distribution.
Slampyak is an award-winning professional illustrator with more than 20 years of experience writing and drawing comic books, comic strips, storyboards, and illustrations of all types. He was the illustrator for the syndicated comic strip Little Orphan Annie for six years, and works on storyboards for movies and TV shows that have filmed in the area like Breaking Bad and Terminator: Salvation. Slampyak received his B.F.A. in graphic design and illustration from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University.
Jackson is the Senior Editor at WoodenBoat, the premier magazine for wooden boat owners, builders, and designers. He received his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon and has been a journalist for more than 30 years, winning numerous awards for writing, page design, and general excellence. A passionate and accomplished sailor and boat builder, Jackson has succeeded in making what he loves best be a central part of his life’s work. He authored the in-depth article “Reaching Deep into History: Restoration shipwrights shed new light on the Charles W. Morgan” which was based on his working alongside Mystic Seaport’s shipwrights for three weeks.
Tyler Putman is a Ph.D. student in the History of American Civilization Program in the Department of History at the University of Delaware, with research interests in material culture and military, maritime, and social history. 
Although the British artist has never seen a live whale, nor spent any time at sea, Hodgkinson is fascinated with whales, whaling, and the history of women in whaling. A professional artist with many solo and group exhibitions to her name, she earned degrees at Chelsea College and Art and Design and Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. In her recent solo exhibition at Crowell’s Fine Art in New Bedford, she used digitally-based non-figurative geometric compositions to explore the unseen depths of the sea and the battle between the sperm whale and giant squid.
Veronica Lawlor is a freelance author, illustrator, educator, and president of 
Hanson has been a painter and illustrator for more than three decades. As an illustrator, he has worked for magazines and major publishing houses. His portraits include a Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court and past winners of the Masters for Golf Digest. In current years, his love of the sea and its lore has influenced his choice of subject matter. Hanson is a signature artist member of the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA), the New England Plein-Air Painters, and an elected artist of the LAA and the North Shore Arts Association. He is an annual participant of the International Marine Art Exhibition and the Modern Marine Masters Exhibition at the Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport.
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.