Welcome

Caroline Levander is the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Carlson Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of English at Rice University. She is currently writing Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S. Mexico Border (Oxford University Press) and Where Is American Literature? (Wiley-Blackwell’s Manifesto Series). Levander has recently co-edited Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010), A Companion to American Literary Studies (2011), and "The Global South and World Disorder," with Walter Mignolo, for The Global South (2011).  She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science's National Leadership grant, among other agencies.

In addition to co-editing a book series, Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, Levander is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke UP 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge UP 1998, paperback reprint 2009) and co-editor of Hemispheric American Studies (2008) and The American Child:  A Cultural Studies Reader (2003).

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.