Overview
R Morris Levine is mostly an essayist. He writes about experimental literature across the twentieth-century: the attempts by novelists, poets, and artists to find unusual literary forms—and to deform Literature itself. In “Freely Espousing: James Schuyler, Surveillance Poetry, and the Queer Otic,” winner of the Diacritics–School of Criticism & Theory Prize, he investigates Schuyler’s reuse of state auditory surveillance as a poetic technique. And in “To Write the Question: Toni Morrison and the Form of Inquiry,” winner of the Duke’s Gender & Race Research Award, he considers Morrison’s invention of an interrogative speech-act—an interrogative without interrogation—not yet accounted for by linguistics. He is particularly interested in twentieth-century experiments with critical and theoretical writing. In “a kind of insatiable cruising: Roland Barthes’ Queer Peripatetic,” he examines Barthes’ revision of the peripatetic tradition of Western philosophy as a Parisian cruise. In “Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault: Eroto-geographies of the Essay,” he elaborates this relationship between desire and the essay form.
Levine is a third-year doctoral student in the Program in Literature, with certificates in African & African American Studies and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. He is a member of the editorial collective of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory; of the conference organizing committee for Fredric Jameson and the Future of Critical Theory; and of the selection committee for the Srinivas Aravamudan Annual Lecture in Critical Theory. From 2018 to 2024, he was the editor of Zolo, a publisher of books by artists. He holds a master’s in Art and the Public Domain from Harvard University, a bachelor’s in Fine Art and Science, Technology, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, and a certificate from the School of Criticism & Theory at Cornell University.
rmorrislevine.info
PHD Literature, Duke University, 2023–. Certificates in African & African American Studies and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. Gender & Race Research Award.
SCT Certificate, School of Criticism & Theory, Cornell University, 2022. First Prize, Diacritics Essay Competition.
MDES Art and the Public Domain, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, 2021. Distinction. Gerald M. McCue Medal. Bok Teaching Certificate in Critical Pedagogy.
BA Science, Technology, and Society; Fine Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Society of the College Prize. Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.