Over_Seas: Melville, Whitman, and all the Intrepid Sailors

ULICES’ Research Group in American Studies is pleased to announce the international conference and exhibition Over_Seas: Melville, Whitman and All the Intrepid Sailors, to be held on 3-5 July, 2019. We aim to foreground the international afterlife of both authors and their contribution to the interconnectedness between the arts, sciences, human philosophy and history, with a special focus on the imagination and memory of the oceans. In line with one of the group’s main axes of research, “(Re)imagining shared pasts over the sea and across borders: dialogue, reception and projections between the USA, the Americas, and Europe,” the title Over_Seas accommodates an eagerness to pour over the depths of wild and cultured nature(s), as well as the transatlantic and transnational dynamics that Melville, Whitman, and various writers on both sides of the Atlantic have helped to shape. In Portugal, the Atlantic will also be the subject of a special celebration in 2019, the 500th anniversary of Fernão de Magalhães’s circumnavigation voyage. This bicentennial celebration aims to bring together scholars with expertise not only in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but also in areas related with the broader and interdisciplinary themes envisaged by the conference itself.