Herman Melville is one of the greatest writers in world literature and his own quest to understand more of his Scottish ancestry has been noted but rarely explored to any depth. The Scottish recognition of Melville's ancestry was established by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s and extends into present-day scholarship and evolving understanding of his significance as a world-traveler, ecological thinker and original initiator of geographical poetics.  For this presentation, Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, draws…