Academic Work
Ian's first scholarly book, Melville's Monumental Imagination (Routledge) came out in 2006. He also wrote the Introductions for the Barnes and Noble editions of Herman Melville's Israel Potter and Walt Whitman's Specimen Days.
Some of his academic articles include "Biographies" in Herman Melville in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018), "Union and Dismemberment: Melville, Whitman, and the Contradictions of American Character" in Monument and Modernity in British and American Art and Literature (Sorbonne Nouvelle Press, 2015), and “Ernest Hemingway’s Miltonic Twist in ‘Up in Michigan’ (The Hemingway Review, Spring 2008).
Melville's Monumental Imagination
Explores the connection between the contested 19th century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors, Herman Melville (1819-1891). The book was written to fill a void in recent Melville scholarship. To date, there has not been a monograph that focuses exclusively on Melville's incorporation of monuments in his fictional world. The book charts the territory of Melville's novels in order to provide a trajectory of the monumental image in one particular literary form. This feature allows the reader to gradually see the monumental image as an important marker that sheds light into Melville's eventual abandonment of long fiction. Melville's Monumental Imagination combines literary analysis and cultural criticism for a long neglected aspect of our nation's iconic development in statuary.
