Caroline Levander

Caroline Levander is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is 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. She has just been awarded an NEH grant to co-teach an NEH Summer Seminar 2007:Towards a Hemispheric American Literature and has been invited to lead a National Humanities Center Dupont Seminar on "The Globalization of American Literary Studies," Summer 2007.

Her research begins with the acknowledgment that literary production, social theory and political cultures were integrally blended in the pre-20thc US. Her research therefore considers the dual questions of American literature's political impact and American political culture's literary effects. Most broadly, her work explores the combined cultural impact of political, social and literary discourses on historically disenfranchised groups including women, children and racial others. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge UP 1998), for example, focuses on women and public life, while Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke UP, 2006), explores the child's obscured links to the racial politics governing U.S. national culture. In order to bring literary and political texts into the most richly productive play, she focuses on diverse archival sources as well as a wide range of literary sources to show how political representation in the US emerges and continues to be shaped by the 'fact' of gender and racial identity.