Dan Bavister FRSA

Thesis Title: Heterotopic Orientations: Romantic Legacies and the Marine Ecology of Herman Melville

Supervisor: Professor Santanu Das

Doctoral Research

My DPhil research examines coastal Romanticism and the maritime imagination of Herman Melville. It develops coastal orientation as a distinct critical framework for reading the coast – rather than the open ocean alone – as an underexamined spatial and ecological category in Melville’s writing. I ask how littoral environments shape relations between land and sea, human and nonhuman life, and competing forms of geographical, historical, and ecological orientation.

Bringing Melville into dialogue with British and American Romanticism, my research traces how he inherits and transforms Romantic modes of perceiving the maritime world amid the environmental, technological, and imperial changes of the nineteenth century. More broadly, I am developing a literary-critical account of coastal orientation that extends beyond Melville across Romantic and nineteenth-century writing.

My research interests include nineteenth-century American literature; British and American Romanticism; environmental humanities and the Blue Humanities; literature and the sea; ecocriticism; spatial theory and literary geography; empire and postcolonial studies; and poetry and poetics.

My doctoral research is funded by the Drue Heinz Scholarship in American Literature at St John’s College. I am also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

Forthcoming Publication

'"The Monumental White Shroud": Polar Orientation and the Cold Desert Imaginary in Moby-Dick'. Forthcoming in Exploring Desert Alterity: From Byzantine and Medieval Histories to Modern Imagination, a volume proposed to University of Exeter Press.