Research Interests: Nineteenth-century American literature; Herman Melville; nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's fiction, popular culture, and media studies; teaching and technology
Wyn Kelley, a member of the Literature Faculty since 1985, has taught courses on American literature, literary genres (comedy, melodrama), women writers, and writing about literature, among others. She is author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996). Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, she has published in a number of journals and collections, including Melville and Hawthorne: Writing Relationship, Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick, Melville and Women, "Whole Oceans Away": Melville in the Pacific, and the Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. She is the editor of Blackwell Publishing's A Companion to Herman Melville and has also written Herman Melville: An Introduction for Blackwell Publishers. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, based in New Bedford, MA, she works with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on projects, lecture series, exhibitions, and conferences related to Melville and the museum's concerns.
Member of Melville Society Cultural Project Steering Committee (in collaboration with New Bedford Whaling Museum): Plan conferences, symposia, public lectures, and film series; manage archive of books by and about Herman Melville; consult on museum exhibitions; support literacy and educational programs in New Bedford and Pawtucket, RI
Associate Editor, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
New Media Literacies (CMS): Work with MIT study group on creative/educational appropriations of classic texts in new media
An Introduction to Herman Melville
Blackwell Publishers, January 2008
"Whole Oceans Away": Melville and the Pacific
Ed. Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, Christopher Sten
Kent State University Press, December 2007
Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York
Cambridge University Press, 1996
http://www.amazon.com/Melvilles-City-Nineteenth-Century-Cambridge-Literature/dp/0521560543/
A Companion to Herman Melville
Blackwell Publishing
http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Melville-Blackwell-Companions-Literature/dp/1405122315/
Chapters in Books
"Melville, Hawthorne, and the Dream of Renaissance Collaboration."
Jana Argersinger and Lee Person, eds.
Hawthorne and Melville: Writing Relationship
(University of Georgia Press, December 2007)
"Lying in Various Attitudes: Staging Pip in Multimedia."
In John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr, eds.
Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006)
"'Tender Kinswoman': Gail Hamilton and Gendered Justice in Billy Budd."
In Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer, eds. Melville and Women
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006)
21L.000J Writing About Literature
21L.003 Reading Fiction
21L.006 American Literature
21L.421 Comedy
21L.430 Popular Narrative
21L.501 American Novel
21L.512 American Authors (American Women Writers)
21L.702 Studies in Fiction: Stowe, Twain, and the Transformation of 19th-Century America
21L.705 Major Authors: Melville and Morrison
21L.705 Major Authors: After the Masterpiece: Novels by Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and Morrison
21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation: Literature of Slavery, Melodrama
