Overview
Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is currently the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature and spends much of her free time engaged in climate activism, including the drive to divest the Cornell endowment (successful in 2020). Lately Levine has been writing about literature and precarity, infrastructural justice, the trouble with anti-instrumentality, and the need to focus on institutions as sites of social change. Recent articles appear in The LA Times, MLQ, NOVEL, Modern Fiction Studies, New Literary History, symploke, Inside Higher Ed, and PMLA.
Research Focus
- Literary and Cultural Theory
- Ecocriticism
- Infrastructure and Climate Justice
- Narrative Theory
- Victorian Literature and Culture
In the news
- Student opinion pieces encourage action on climate change
- Humanists have the power and the tools to fight climate change
- What to read in 2022? A&S faculty weigh in
- New A&S faculty bring Indigenous studies expertise
- Trustees approve new Department of Literatures in English name change
- The Case for a Higher Education Bailout
- Grants fund community-engaged learning curricula
- New podcast episode examines an impact of incarceration
- New podcast episode explores racism and resilience
- Inequalities in the workplace explored in new podcast episode
- New podcast episode examines parenting inequities
- Health inequities and storytelling in new podcast episode
- Conference spotlights ‘Energy Humanities’
- Podcast explores inequality’s impact on well-being
- New podcast season explores inequality
- First Rural Humanities showcase spotlights Cornell-community projects
- Cornell funds projects in NYC visioning initiative
- Podcast considers Nile’s centrality to Egypt
- Podcast explores where earth’s water came from
- Podcast explores ‘What Does Water Mean for Us Humans?’
- Unequal Parenting
- Interstellar Water
- Water Rights
- Lived Experience
- Water Connections
- Clean Water
- Segregated Education
- The Need for Trees
- Love Bonds
- Topophilia
- Science of Love
- Unintended Consequences | Season 2, Ep. 5
- Unintended Consequences
- Cultivating Environments | Season 2, Ep. 4
- Levine keeps the 'Norton Anthology of World Literature' fresh
- Homecoming Roundup 2017
- Arts & Sciences Launches ‘What Makes Us Human’ Podcast Series
- Forms: Their rhythms, shapes, designs
- A&S plans host of activities for Reunion 2017