Herman Melville

Online course: Moby-Dick: An introduction to a great American novel

I’m delighted to be teaching an online course on Herman Melville’s magisterial novel, Moby-Dick, this summer as part of a Virtual Summer Festival of Learning at the Institute for Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. After our normal summer programmes were cancelled due to COVID-19, it didn’t look like we’d be able to do anything at all this summer. Luckily, the team have worked hard to bring students a new form of course that are open to everyone, anywhere in the world.

The course will run from 6 to 10 July 2020 and will consist of pre-recorded lectures - to be watched at your leisure over the week of the course - and an online discussion with students and with me. I’m really pleased with how the lectures have turned out and I hope they’ll be illuminating for even old aficionados of the novel. They cover:

  • Melville’s life and early career

  • Melville’s relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and how it profoundly altered the shape of Moby-Dick

  • Captain Ahab’s dictatorial tendencies

  • Religious symbolism and mystical experiences in Moby-Dick

  • Melville’s treatment of race and slavery in the novel

More information about the course and instructions for how to register can be found here

Cambridge summer courses: cancelled due to COVID-19

Updated 28 April 2020: The courses advertised below have, sadly, been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge has cancelled its International Summer Programmes. Plans are currently in place to create a “Virtual Summer Festival of Learning” to stand-in for the cancelled summer programme. More information is available here.

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I’ll be teaching two courses this year at the University of Cambridge as part of the Institute of Continuing Education’s International Summer Programmes.

Last year’s course on Irish comic fiction is now a fully-fledged Beckett course: we’ll be reading Murphy and Watt - two of Beckett’s funniest novels - and examining their debts to Irish and Anglo-Irish comic authors such as Sterne, Joyce, and Swift.

I’m also delighted to be running a brand-new course on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. This great saga of revenge, friendship, and philosophical exploration in the whaling fisheries of the south seas is one of my very favourite books. It’s a life-changing read that will more than repay the attention afforded by a week-long course.

More information is available on my courses page and my university page.