Senior chosen to present Melville research at prestigious conference in Poland

RELEASED: May 10, 2007

DANVILLE, KY—In August, senior Karen Biscopink will join 90 leading scholars from around the world gathering in Szczecin, Poland, for “Hearts of Darkness: Melville and Conrad in the Space of World Culture,” an international conference on American novelist Herman Melville. What makes Biscopink unique among this elite group of individuals is that she was the only undergraduate selected for this global conference. She will join scholars from larger U.S. institutions such as Berkeley and smaller schools such as Davidson and Grinnell, in addition to scholars from major universities in 21 other countries.

Biscopink’s idea for her conference presentation grew out of a paper she wrote last fall for an English junior seminar in Melville and Tristram Shandy. 

"She did a very interesting and integrative thing with her Melville junior seminar paper last fall, using her second major in drama to give what I thought was a very innovative and insightful reading of a Moby-Dick chapter that most scholars have just passed over," says Milton Reigelman, J. Rice Cowan Professor of English, who is working with Biscopink to revise her paper for the conference.

In her presentation, Biscopink will analyze the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter of Moby-Dick as a theatrical work, and then suggest that this chapter is Melville’s microcosm for the entire novel.    

While at Centre, Biscopink, from Loveland, Ohio, has been involved in a number of activities, most recently taking part in the Centre production of The Vagina Monologues.

The Hanseatic port city of Szczecin, Poland, was chosen as the gathering site because on the day the conference begins the summer's Tall Ships Race will end there after beginning in Denmark and touching ports in Sweden and Finland.  The conference’s opening ceremony will take place aboard what has been called “the most beautiful tall ship in the world” and will include the president of Poland as well as the Polish ambassadors of the United States and the United Kingdom.

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