Everything is “Moby-Dick,” according to Hester Blum.
Does the novel relate to oceanic studies? Obviously. Climate change and clean energy? Absolutely. “Moby-Dick” and “Heated Rivalry”? That, too.
Since she first read Herman Melville’s novel at 17, it has been a touchstone in her life and in her career as the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and a professor of environmental studies, both in WashU Arts & Sciences.
“I think about ‘Moby-Dick’ every day,” Blum said. “Seriously, Melville could make me cry right now.”
For Blum, the novel continues to speak to each generation, opening onto questions of race, power, disability, queerness, labor and the environment. That capacity to find new meaning in familiar texts has shaped a career that is both highly specialized and unusually wide-ranging.
Blum is a leading scholar of 19th-century U.S. literature and culture, the environmental humanities, and oceanic and polar studies. She joined WashU in 2025 after 22 years at Penn State University. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation have supported her work. Her two award-winning books examine how life at sea shaped what people read, wrote and imagined. “The News at the Ends of the Earth” explores printed materials created by 19th- and early 20th-century polar explorers. “The View from the Masthead” considers how the shipboard lives of 19th-century sailors shaped their writing.
Blum’s work moves easily between specialized scholarship and public conversation. She founded C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and, in 2022, edited a new edition of “Moby-Dick” that emphasizes the novel’s relevance to contemporary questions. She recently developed a podcast about the novel with writer, actor and comedian Rob Delaney, had a semifinal run on the “Jeopardy!” Professors Tournament, and is writing a nonfiction book about her love of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”
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