Welcome

Caroline Levander is the Carlson Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is currently writing Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S. Mexico Border (under contract, Oxford University Press) and Where Is American Literature? (for Wiley-Blackwell’s Manifesto Series), and co-editing Teaching and Studying the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan) and A Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell).  She is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke University Press, 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge University Press 1998, paperback reprint 2009) as well as co-editor of Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2008) and The American Child:  A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2003).

She is co-editor of a book series, Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, co-founder of the Americas Colloquium at Rice University and has developed the Rice Americas Archive. In collaboration with University of Maryland's Early Americas Digital Archive, the Americas Archive has generated the Our Americas Archive Partnership, which was awarded a 3-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for $979,578.  She has led an NEH Summer Seminar on the topic of hemispheric American literature and a National Humanities Center Dupont seminar on the globalization of American literary studies.

Her research revisits long-standing critical assumptions about territory, geography, nation and textuality that have tended to shape the study of American literature. Using a wide range of archival and literary sources, Levander explores how the writing of prominent Americans as well as those historically disenfranchised within the United States—women, children, and racially diverse citizens—reconstitutes conceptual frameworks of nation formation and literary heritage. Most recently her research has focused on the geographic and temporal parameters of American literature. Cradle of Liberty (2006) began to push at the geopolitical boundaries of U.S. literary culture, with chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois and Cuba, Twain’s writing on the parallels between late-century German and U.S. racialized nationalism, and sentimental writing along the U.S./Mexico border. Subsequent work has taken as its central concern the complex, overlapping geopolitical networks out of which national boundaries and literatures emerge. This work has sought to identify the substantive challenges and opportunities generated by approaching American literature from the vantage point of a hemispheric perspective.