Hester Blum was installed as the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English on Feb. 10, 2026.

The program included a welcome from Feng Sheng Hu, the Richard G. Engelsmann Dean of Arts & Sciences and Lucille P. Markey Distinguished Professor, and remarks from Abram Van Engen, chair of the Department of English and Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities. Hu performed the installation and medallion presentation.

In her remarks, titled “Polar Humanities: An English Professor in the Arctic,” Blum discussed her research on the literary communities of shipboard Arctic explorers. Drawing on cultural artifacts such as newspapers, menus, and other printed materials from 19th-century expeditions, she examines how explorers documented extreme environments and what their writings might teach us about confronting climate change today.

“I was interested in how historical expedition members wrestled with questions of time and space … and what their strategies might teach us about reckoning with climate extremity today,” Blum said. She also emphasized the foundational role of Indigenous Inuit communities in Arctic science. “The Inuit are the first Arctic researchers,” Blum said. “Inuit knowledge is not a complement to science. It is science and has rarely been recognized as such outside of humanistic frameworks.”

Hu praised Blum’s experiential, multidisciplinary approach to teaching and research, which has included multiple ocean expeditions.

“From researching ocean health in the Arctic Circle to lecturing on the seas around Antarctica, she truly exemplifies the spirit of a hands-on researcher, scholar, and teacher,” Hu said.

About Hester Blum

Hester Blum is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English and a professor of environmental studies (courtesy affiliation) at WashU. She previously taught at Penn State for 22 years.

Blum earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1995. Her scholarship focuses on oceanic and polar studies, 19th-century U.S. literature and culture, Herman Melville, and the environmental humanities. She studies how reading and writing practices emerge in extreme environments, with particular attention to the literary culture of long-voyaging sailors.

In recent years, Blum has both studied and joined shipboard communities. She sailed on the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world’s last surviving wooden whaleship; participated in the National Science Foundation-sponsored Northwest Passage Project, an Arctic expedition tracking climate change, and its accompanying documentary, “Frozen Obsession”; lectured on a cruise to Antarctica; and traveled to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard with The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency. She has also conducted research in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Greenland, and Sápmi.

Blum is the author of “The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration” (Duke University Press, 2019) and “The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives” (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). She edited the 2022 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” among other scholarly volumes.

In addition to her field-building work in oceanic and polar humanities, Blum founded C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She has served as president or director of C19, the Herman Melville Society, and several research centers at Penn State.

Her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and numerous research libraries and scholarly societies. She was elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society in 2013.

Blum grew up in New Jersey and now lives in St. Louis with her husband, Jonathan Eburne. They have a 19-year-old child, Al, a sophomore at Bard College in New York. In 2021, Blum reached the semifinals of the “Jeopardy!” Professors Tournament.

About Lynne Cooper Harvey

The Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Chair in English was established in 1998 through a gift from Lynne Cooper Harvey to Washington University’s American Culture Studies program.

Born in St. Louis on Oct. 4, 1912, Cooper Harvey earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from WashU in 1934 and 1935 and received an honorary doctorate of humanities in 1998.

She built a distinguished career as a developer, producer, director, editor, and writer of radio and television programs and became known as the “First Lady of Radio.” Her career began at KXOK in St. Louis, where she met Paul Harvey. The two married in 1940 and had one son.

For more than 40 years, Lynne produced “Paul Harvey News,” one of the highest-rated radio programs in the country. Broadcast on more than 1,200 radio stations and 400 Armed Forces Network stations, it was considered the world’s largest one-person show. ABC began carrying the program nationally in 1951.

In 1997, she became the first producer inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications. She was also the first woman to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago chapter of American Women in Radio and Television and among the first women to produce an entire newscast at CBS.

An active community member and philanthropist, she received WashU’s Founders Day Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997 and the Robert S. Brookings Award in 2001. She died May 3, 2008, at age 95.