The Inner Lives of Sailors

With Hester Blum, Ph.D.

A professor at Penn State University and the author of several books, Hester Blum teaches courses in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture in the English department. Her scholarship focuses on oceanic studies, book history and material text studies, Herman Melville, and the environmental humanities. Professor Blum is currently a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2019-2020) and her work has also been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (including a 2014-2015 NEH Fellowship). In July 2014 she participated in the 38th Voyage of the CHARLES W. MORGAN with Mystic Seaport Museum. For her live online talk, Professor Blum will explore what happens when a place of manual labor becomes a location of creative and intellectual work as well. She will discuss how mariners–whose leisure hours were spent on ships, not at home–turned to artistic practice to nurture rich inner lives, yet the material conditions of their sailing lives were always present in their domestic, creative work.

The Sailor Made lecture series was funded by Connecticut Humanities, a nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports cultural and historic organizations that tell the state’s stories, build community and enrich lives.