Professor Melville's areas of expertise are contemporary art, theory and historiography. He has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. Most recently, he served as resident faculty at the Getty Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies (University of Rochester, 1999), and has given invited letures at Cornell University (Ruth Woolsey Findley and William Nichols Findley Lecture), The Johns Hopkins University, and The Tate Modern in London. With Philip Armstrong (Division of Comparative Studies) and Laura Lisbon (Painting), he curated a major exhibition of contemporary painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts in May, 2001. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue from The MIT Press. He has been active on numerous committees for the American Society for Aesthetics and has been on the editorial board for both the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.