Professor and Chair
Academic Degrees
Professor Levin presently serves as Chair of the Department of English and Linguistics and as Professor of English. He formerly served as UMW Provost (2013-17), and before that served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Drew University and Dean of the School of Humanities at Purchase College--SUNY. He served as Assistant and Associate Professor of English at Columbia University and as Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, where he was also English Department Chair. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Duke UP, 1999), selected a Choice "Outstanding Title" in 2000. He also edited popular editions of Thoreau's Walden and "Civil Disobedience" and Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, as well a a children's illustrated Walt Whitman (originally published by Sterling and reissued in paperback by Scholastic). His main areas of teaching and scholarship include the American Renaissance, American Pragmatism, and American literature from about 1830 to the present. His favorite novels include Moby-Dick, Gravity's Rainbow, anything by Philip Roth, and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series; he also enjoys modern and contemporary poetry, having written his PhD dissertation on Wallace Stevens, Finally, he is an avid St. Louis and University of Michigan sports fan (Go Redirds, Go Blue!), and enjoys teaching a writing intensive course on writing about sports. He lives in Fredericksburg with his awesome wife and two daughters, as well as his trusted companions, Bam Bam and Baxter.