Recent & Future Talks:

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•  "Telegraphing the Weather" (C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, April 2020)

•  "Melville and the Meaning of Life" (Arizona Quarterly Symposium, Tucson, March 2020)

• “Reading Weather in the Nineteenth Century" (CEES Colloquium, Winston-Salem, TBD 2020)

• “Mentoring Graduate Students" (Modern Language Association, Seattle, January 2020)

• “Melville and the Model of Early Organic Chemistry” (Melville’s Measures, Paris, October 2019)

News & Media:

Interviewed for C19 Podcast on Elizabeth Melville, Herman Melville, and Women's Work

David Foster Wallace was wearing his trademark bandanna and a white shirt with a Nehru collar when Christopher Bench '05 and Meredith Farmer '05 met him. Spread in front of him were the pages of the Commencement address he was about to give, occupying most of the table in the Sunset Cottage seminar room. They were covered in ink; he was still revising-cutting, mostly. Also scattered around the room were cups of spit, from the tobacco he'd been chewing. When Farmer told him she'd been the one who nominated him to speak at their graduation, he said, "F*** you, I'm not old enough for this. I'm not my father!" and laughed.

  Also discussed in "David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen" (Huffington Post, May 2016).