Bob Levine wins a Guggenheim Fellowship!

Read on to hear more about this great honor!

Bob Levine has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year.  He was hesitant to go on about the award, but called it “a great thing,” and moved right into discussion of his work. (How apropos to the work ethic that's gotten him here!)

Bob plans to use the fellowship to support his book in progress,  The Lives of Frederick Douglass, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.  About the book, he writes, “Ranging from the 1840s to the present day, my book will provide a literary and cultural history of the lives and afterlives of Frederick Douglass. Unlike the typical biography, the book will be a “meta-biography” of sorts—a study of how U.S. culture has conceived, or invented, what I am terming the lives of Douglass. Douglass wrote three very different versions of his life (1845; 1855; 1881, rev. 1892). In this respect, Douglass himself offers us a warrant for thinking about his various “lives.” From beginning to end, the book will thus also pay close attention to Douglass’s canny acts of self-representation, whether in autobiographies, lectures and essays, or photographs. Douglass was a contradictory, complex, and performative figure who ultimately baffles efforts to reduce his life to a single story. In short, the book examines Douglass both in his own time and beyond, with the hope of offering new perspectives on Douglass and racial representativeness in the United States."

Bob is one of three Guggenheim winners from this department in the last four years, and several more in years prior.  Congratulations to Bob Levine and the department as a whole!