Herman Melville Hester Blum is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University.
She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008) and The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (2019), as well as several edited volumes.
Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society, and her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W.
Morgan , the worlds last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet , in which Melville sailed.
