Robert Levine

Class of 2013-14

University of Maryland
Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Scholarship
Outstanding Book Award, Choice Magazine

A highly regarded leader in American literary studies, Robert S. Levine has been an influential force in American and African-American literature for thirty years, and more recently has contributed important new work to the study of the literature of the Americas.

His scholarly editions of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe have brought their extensive writings to wider audiences.

Levine is the general editor of the five-volume Norton Anthology of American Literature, which has been read by hundreds of thousands of students. He is professor of English and a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies.

Levine received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1981.

He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity won an Outstanding Book Award from Choice magazine in 1997.

In December 2013, Levine was chosen to receive the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary scholarship from the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association.

Levine sits on a number of editorial boards, including American Literary History; Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; Nathaniel Hawthorne Review;and J19: The Journal for Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

In addition to his book on Delany and Douglass, Levine’s work includes more than fifty-five peer-reviewed articles and five edited collections of essays, as well as his 2008 book Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth Century American Literary Nationalism and his 1989 book Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville.

Levine is currently under contract with Harvard University Press to write a history of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical writings and cultural legacy, and he is editing two volumes of Douglass’s writings for Yale University Press.

Well known as an enthusiastic teacher, Levine presented a TIAS Eminent Scholar Public Lecture, “Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, and the Civil War,” in October 2013. As a TIAS Faculty Fellow, he coordinated his other presentations on campus through the College of Liberal Arts’ Department of English.

For more updated information: https://english.umd.edu/directory/robert-levine

Students

Rene H. Treviño – 2013-14