Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Hester Blum, Professor of English at Penn State University. Her keynote address is entitled: “Polar Erratics: In and Out of Place in Circumpolar Seas.” She is the author of The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Duke 2019) and The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (UNC 2008), as well as the editor of the Oxford edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (2022), among other volumes. She has participated in several research expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica, and her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.