2026 Moby-Dick Symposium

April 17-19, 2026 |  Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures 

Chicago, Hyde Park

Agenda

April 17, 2026

Optional Activities:

1:00-2:00 p.m.: Special Collections, Regenstein Library: Melville/Moby Dick manuscripts

2:00-3:00 p.m.: Special Collections, Regenstein Library: Melville/Moby Dick manuscripts

3:30-4:30 p.m.: Afternoon Tea with Dean Seth Green at the Quadrangle Club

Enjoy tea and conversation with Dean Seth Green at the historic Quadrangle Club. Share Connect with fellow learners over light refreshments in one of campus’s most beautiful venues.

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) 

5:00-6:00 p.m.: Registration & Welcome

6:00-7:30 p.m.: Reading Pip: The Thread of Black Consciousness in Moby Dick | John L. Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English, HOFSTRA University

Explore how Melville’s recollection of a Black sailor shaped his creative process in writing Moby Dick, interrupted his narrative, and gives the novel a thread of Black consciousness that unites Ishmael’s and Ahab’s separate comic and tragic perspectives.  The presentation will conclude with some reflections on how biography as a form of critical thinking contributes to our reading of text, self, and democratic culture.

7:30-8:30 p.m.: Reception

April 18, 2026

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) 

8:30-9:00 a.m. : Light Breakfast

9:00-10:15 a.m.: The Politics of the Pequod, Lin Atnip | Basic Program Instructor

Moby-Dick may be and has been read as an allegory of American democracy and the threats thereto, with Captain Ahab as the demagogue and tyrant who through the force of rhetoric and bribery diverts the Ship of State from public to personal ends and ultimately to its doom. While granting the validity of such readings, they tend to ignore or downplay Ahab’s greatness–his (distinctively American) nobility and the signs of his natural authority which appear throughout the text. I will develop a politically oriented reading that integrates this nobility as well as the obvious disastrousness of Ahab’s mad and monomaniac quest for the White Whale. I will propose that Moby-Dick not only illuminates potential dangers to (American) democracy but also reflects the conditions of the democratic project itself and the deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions within that project, suggesting that without a shared conception of the real depths and darknesses in the world, both the exceptional individual and the public mass are differently susceptible to being stove in the pursuit of phantoms of that darkness. 

10:30-11:30 a.m.: Small Group Discussions led by Basic Program Instructors

11:30-12:30 p.m.: Break

12:00-1:30 p.m.: Lunch at the Quadrangle Club

1:30 -2:45 p.m.: Moby-Dick, Natural History, and the Comic Sense of Life. | Julia Mueller, Basic Program Instructor

This is part two of a lecture on Moby-Dick and natural history given to the Basic Program back in January 2024. It explores the way Melville’s sense of natural history helps to shape the comic sensibility of Moby-Dick, picking up on some of the comic undercurrents of Darwin’s natural history.

3:00-4:00 p.m.: Small Group Discussions led by Basic Program Instructors

Optional Activities:

6:00-8:00 p.m.:: Dine out with Basic Program instructors at a selection of local restaurants. Instructors will lead small groups to nearby venues—sign up at the registration desk. Meal costs are not covered by the symposium ticket.

8:00-10:00 p.m.: Screening of Moby Dick (1956), dir. John Huston (Breasted Hall, ISAC)

April 19, 2026

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) 

8:30-9:00 a.m. : Light Breakfast

9:00-10:15 a.m.: O! that unfulfillments should follow the prophets!”: Moby-Dick as Parable for the Anthropocene, Amy Thomas Elder | Basic Program Instructor

 In Moby-Dick the sperm whale is simultaneously an image and symbol for an incomprehensible power and magnitude (God or Nature or whatever is beyond our power to symbolize at all) and a commodity exploited by astonishing human technology—and courage. Ishmael’s recollection of Job 41 reflects on the impossibility of reconciling these two: “O! that unfulfillments should follow the prophets,” he cries. Much of his musing has been persuasively interpreted as a response to the death of God, though Moby-Dick himself represents the triumph of that incomprehensible power over all. 

175 years later, Moby-Dick looks like a prescient parable for the Anthropocene, in which, write two prominent theorists:  “Human impacts have outgrown our capacity to comprehend, let alone manage them. Some phenomena…described by philosopher Timothy Morton as “hyperobjects” … operate at scales of time and space that defy our ability to grasp them. (Heinberg and Miller, Welcome to the Great Unravelling, p. 39) Moby-Dick, then, is a precursor of the hyperobject, though more beautiful and divine than global warming or a nuclear bomb. 

This talk will examine how Moby-Dick can help us imagine what it means to have discovered our impotent omnipotence—incapable of understanding or controlling our own capability to destroy our planet and ourselves.

10:30-12:00 p.m.: Closing Panel | Lin Atnip, John Bryant, Amy Thomas Elder, Julia Mueller