Welcome

Caroline Levander is 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 Why American Literature? (for Wiley-Blackwell’s Manifesto Series), and co-editing Studying the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan).  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) 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 new 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 recently 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 begins with the acknowledgment that nineteenth-century US literature and politics were integrally blended. Most broadly, her work considers the dual questions of American literature's political impact and American political culture's literary effects. 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.