The English Department is pleased to announce that our 2017 Joseph M. Duffy Lecturer is Robert S. Levine, Distinguished University Professor of the University of Maryland. Professor Levine's lecture, "Frederick Douglass in Fiction: From Harriet Beecher Stowe to John Updike and James McBride" will take place at 5:30 pm, Thursday, October 5, in the Annenberg Auditorium of the Snite Museum of Art. A reception will follow.
Robert S. Levine has been an influential force in American and African American literary studies for over thirty years, and more recently has contributed important work to the burgeoning field of hemispheric and transnational American literary studies. His prominent publications cover an array of themes critical to an understanding of 19th-century American literature. His most recent book is The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016). He has also published Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008). His next monograph, Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, is scheduled for an early 2018 publication. In addition to his critical books, Levine's scholarly editions of Melville, Hawthorne, Martin Delany, Douglass, James Whitfield, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe have helped to make available both canonical and lesser known works to wider audiences.
The Duffy Lecture Series honors the great teacher-scholar Joseph M. Duffy (1924-1988), who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1954 to 1988.