By David Gordon, News Editor

Dr. John Bryant, an English professor who has been with the University since 1986, has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for $175,000 over the next two years to launch the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online archive of Herman Melville’s body of work.

“Dr. Bryant is a nationally recognized Melville scholar, and he is doing truly innovative work in making Melville both more accessible and more deeply appreciated,” said English Department Chair Dr. Joseph Fichtelberg.

MEL will contain a searchable collection of Melville’s manuscripts, texts and other works in which students, scholars and general readers will be able to view and discuss. “This has been a long time in the works because it just seemed like a natural concept to put together the work that I was doing on Melville’s manuscripts,” Bryant said.

By the conclusion of the two-year grant period, Melville’s works “Moby-Dick,” “Billy Budd” and “Battle-Pieces,” a collection of his Civil War poetry, will be online. Currently available to view through the University’s research database is an electronic edition of Melville’s “Typee,” which blends and compares manuscripts, transcriptions and interpretations of the text. Bryant refers to this tool as “fluid texts,” part of a program called TextLab, currently being developed by the Faculty Computing Services.

Bryant also hopes to have a global positioning system of Melville’s travels created at some point.

“I think it’s fair to say that, with his own stellar achievement, Dr. Bryant has also made Hofstra’s English Department shine,” Fichtelberg said.

Pictured Dr. John Bryant (Photo Courtesy of Hofstra University)