Robert S. Levine

Distinguished University Professor

View his personal website here.

The impressively prolific Bob Levine has been an influential force in American and African American literature for over thirty years, and more recently has contributed important work to the burgeoning field of hemispheric and transnational American literary studies. His prominent publications cover an array of themes critical to an understanding of 19th-century American literature. His most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard UP, 2016), Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2018), and The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (W. W. Norton, 2021). He has also published Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008). In addition to his critical books, Levine's scholarly editions of Melville, Hawthorne, Martin Delany, Douglass, James Whitfield, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe have helped to make available both canonical and lesser known works to wider audiences.

Levine is a highly visible figure in Americanist literary circles, sitting on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and Journal of American Studies, serving as General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and editing numerous volumes of collected criticism, including Hemispheric American Studies (coedited with Caroline Levander) and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Nevertheless, Levine remains equally visible in Tawes Hall. Besides organizing the annual Local Americanists lecture series, Levine is known as a vigorous and enthusiastic teacher committed to the success of his graduate and undergraduate students.

Levine's excellence has not gone without recognition. In 2007 he was honored as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, and in 2013 he was appointed Distinguished University Professor. His recent awards include a 2012-13 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship and a 2013-14 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. During 2013-15 he was a visiting Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M’s Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014 the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association awarded him the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American literary studies.