Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World

Melillo will talk about the productive tensions between conceptualizing the Pacific World as a twenty-first-century heuristic device and understanding it as a nineteenth-century imagined geography. Melillo’s next book project, Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World, explores the myriad environmental and cultural connections between Nantucket—a forty-eight square-mile island off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts—and the distant environments and foreign cultures in and around the Pacific Ocean.