Samantha O'Connor

Samantha O’Connor is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Maryland. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century American literature, with an emphasis on religious rhetoric, moral authority, race and gender, and reception history. She is currently writing a dissertation on Herman Melville, tentatively entitled Melville and Mysticism. Her project suggests that Melville rewired his contemporaries’ then-competing associations with the terms “mystic,” “mystical,” and “mysticism”—offering a new portrait of his century’s heroes and villains. Samantha recently published a short article on Melville’s Pierre in a special issue of South Central Review.