In my senior year at Stanford, I wrote “In Some Enchanted Way, Inverted:” Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a paper that ended up being a big deal for me. An excerpt was published in Stanford’s Glosses magazine and the paper won some prizes, the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts and the Marie Louise Rosenberg Prize from the English Department. Sadly, it is still the highlight of my (non)career. Table of contents and full text.

My thesis advisor was the late, great Jay Fliegelman and my second reader was Brett Bourbon.