Recent & Future Talks:

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

• “Reading Weather in the Nineteenth Century" (CEES Colloquium, Winston-Salem, December 2019)

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

• "Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn" (Melville Society Conference, June 2019)

• "The History and Structure of the Melville Society" (Melville Society Conference, June 2019)

• “Reading Weather in the Nineteenth Century" (National Museum of American History, May 2019)

News & Media:

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).