Introduction

At the 2025 Melville Society Conference in Mystic, Connecticut, Melville scholars had the opportunity to celebrate the truly extraordinary contributions that Robert K. Wallace (known to his friends across the Melville Society and beyond as “Bob,” which is the nomenclature used hereafter) has made to multiple aspects of Melville Studies in areas ranging from the visual arts and music to the public and digital humanities. The roundtable was organized by Brian Yothers, who contributed, and it also included contributions from Dawn Coleman, Christopher Freeburg, Jake Heggie (who was not able to attend, but passed on his remarks in advance), Wyn Kelley, Peter Michael Martin, and Steven Olsen-Smith. Bob was in attendance and shared a response that included his own story of how he came to contribute to Melville scholarship across so many fields, and even the story of how, with the assistance of a helpful postal worker, he was able to cancel his acceptance of law school admission in order to choose a career in literary studies, to the great benefit of Melville scholarship and the Melville Society. The forum that follow below includes the contributions to the roundtable by Yothers, Olsen-Smith, Kelley, Freeburg, Martin, and Heggie. As we were preparing this forum, it became evident that Coleman’s wide-ranging and incisive reading of Bob’s contributions to the study of Melville and the arts should take the form of a stand-alone essay, which appears in this issue of Leviathan alongside the forum (29–47). Within the forum, Yothers discusses Bob’s massive Melville &Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Georgia, 1992) and its ongoing influence on studies of Melville’s treatment of the visual arts. Olsen-Smith discusses the more recent influence of Melville’s Print Collection Online, the superb digital resource that Bob has co-created and continues to develop with Samuel Otter. Wyn Kelley relates her experience in the public humanities sphere with Bob in the Melville Society Cultural Project and introduces a felicitous term, “the Bob effect,” to describe the myriad ways in which Bob has brought scholars and artists together. Christopher Freeburg considers the many ways in which Bob has been critical to the growth of scholarship connecting Melville’s work with that of Frederick Douglass. Peter Michael Martin relates the ways in which his own superb series of Melville-related artworks have developed in conversation with Bob, and Jake Heggie offers and appreciation of Bob’s ongoing connection with Heggie’s magnificent Moby-Dick opera. We are grateful for Leviathan Editor Jennifer Greiman’s generosity in providing space for this forum to appear in the journal, and this entire piece (and the accompanying essay by Dawn Coleman) is an expression of the profound gratitude that we feel for and to Bob Wallace. Thank you, Bob, and we look forward to your continuing contributions to our understanding of Melville and the arts, and so much more.