Caroline Levine (born 1970) is an American scholar and literary critic. She is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University.
Early life and education Levine was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York. Her father, Joseph M. Levine (19332008), was a Distinguished Professor at Syracuse University, specializing in the intellectual history of early modern England. Her brother, Peter, is a political philosopher and political scientist at Tufts University.
Levine earned her A.B. from Princeton University in 1992, choosing Comparative Literature as a major because she disliked the nationalist history approach to English literature. She moved to England for graduate work, earning her DPhil in English at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1996. She has said that her training there was influenced by the questions of British cultural studies.
She is unrelated to Victorian literature scholar George Levine.
Career Levine assumed her position as David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University in 2016, and she was the Picket Family Chair of the English Department from 2018 to 2021. Prior to her work at Cornell, Levine taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2002 to 2016 and was chair of the English Department from 2013 to 2016. She held previous appointments in the English Department at Rutgers University–Camden (1998–2002) and Wake Forest University (1997–1998).
Levine's published works are in the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, Victorian literature, environmental humanities, narrative theory, world literature, and infrastructure studies.
Levine has published twenty academic articles on Victorian literature, including four articles on George Eliot, four articles on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, two articles on John Ruskin, as well as articles on Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Clare, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Henry Mayhew. She has said her interest in the Victorian period began with its interest in collectives, such as the "shared utterance" in poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Levine is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature, a role she views as essential to democratizing literature. She also co-founded the Mellon World Literatures Workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Shift to Climate Activism and Public Humanism Levine is an activist and public intellectual working to address climate change and sustainability. In the course of her career, she has retooled formalist methods to address the climate crisis. She has acknowledged this professional shift, noting that the values she now advocates for (e.g., stability, predictability, and continuity) are values she had rejected in her first three books, all of which ended with a focus on open-endedness.
While traditional literary criticism often prizes "anti-instrumentality"—the idea that art should be studied for its own sake rather than for a practical goal—Levine argues that the climate crisis has made this kind of over-analysis a luxury human beings can no longer afford. She has moved from the analysis of fictional worlds to the active engineering of the real one through policy, divestment, and collective organizing. While some literary experts spend their time debating the "hidden meanings" or "ambiguity" of a book, Levine uses her expertise in "forms" to move away from just discussing ideas and toward pushing for practical solutions like stronger labor unions and better laws conducive to systemic environmental change. Recent work by Levine includes an article concerning the necessity for fixed, reliable, and egalitarian clean water pathways for the survival of the indigent amid the climate crisis.
Levine still considers herself a literary critic because she uses the methodological tools of her training and researches historical conditions, analyzing the artfulness of how social worlds are designed. She moves fluidly between nineteenth-century literature and modern climate policy because she sees both through the lens of form. Levine is willing to challenge the norms of her profession and has called for a "different literary studies" that's unafraid to be "tormented" by global crises and take direct action. She is a member of TIAA-Divest and Citizens Climate Lobby and was a leader in the successful effort to make Cornell University divest from fossil fuels.
Levine has discussed her hands-on local activist work on college campuses, which she believes are full of students at major turning points in their livesmoments when people are naturally more open to taking on new civic responsibilities. To tap into this, she has helped develop online sustainability modules at Cornell University for incoming first-year students. These modules educate students on local infrastructure and explicitly ask them to name three existing campus climate organizations they may wish to join. Levine encourages campus tracking where students, whom she characterizes as foot soldiers, join existing efforts and commit to collective work.
Levine was awarded a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a nine-month residency that runs from September 2026 through May 2027. During this time, she is expected to be in residence in Cambridge to engage with her cohort. Her research during the fellowship will focus on theories of power and agency specifically in the context of the climate crisis. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2026 and will be formally inducted in November 2026.
Personal life Levine was previously married to the American scholar Professor Jon McKenzie, Director of StudioLab and Professor of Practice at Cornell University, whom she has described as the most serious pleasure in her life.
Levine has two sons, as well as a daughter whom she has characterized as a radical and a Marxist.
She has spent time traveling in the Moroccan countryside, where she observed how local villages traditionally manage and share river irrigation.
In terms of politics, Levine has firmly aligned her identity and goals with the broader left. She has emphasized that her core commitment is finding practical strategies to achieve economic equality, distribute resources fairly, and organize collective action to fight crises like climate change. She has said that she does not, however, fit into traditional Marxist frameworks.
Levine maintains a close personal friendship with the Marxist theorist and critic Professor Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois-Chicago), describing her as her best interlocutor.
Notable works Levine's first monograph, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003), was an interdisciplinary literary study that began as doctoral research, funded by a British Marshall Commission fellowship. Levine argued that narrative suspense functioned as a corollary to the scientific method. Drawing on nineteenth-century philosophy of science, she claimed that both novelists and scientists relied on the "doubtful pause"—a rigorous suspension of judgment required to test hypotheses before asserting truth. By inviting readers to speculate while withholding immediate resolution, suspenseful plots in Victorian novels served as a form of epistemological training, democratizing the 'don't-believe-it-until-you-see-the-proof' mindset that was central to Victorian realism. Levine primarily focused on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde to demonstrate her argument.
Levine's second monograph, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), was spurred by contemporary culture wars and legal battles over art funding and obscenity. Levine set out to use her expertise in narrative theory to explain why public outrages were a sign of health for democracy rather than a sign of its decay. She argued that the avant-garde and provocative art are not a threat to democracy but a functional necessity for it, reframing starving artists and transgressive artists as democratic heroes whose role is to protect the public sphere from conformity. Rebutting the idea that art should reflect the will of the majority, she claimed that democracy requires art that challenges, shocks, and unsettles mainstream values. Provoking Democracy is less about one time period than about how the idea of the rebellious artist survived and evolved across different centuries. The artists Levine examined span the 1800s to the 2000s, including D.H. Lawrence, John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Bertolt Brecht, Constantin Brâncuși, Richard Serra, and Andreas Gursky.
Levine's third monograph, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), argued that aesthetic patterns (which Levine calls "forms") are not just found in art, but may function as tools for control and analysis. According to Levine, a pattern like a hierarchy works the same way in a poem as it does in a company, society, or government. For example, a hierarchy may rank the protagonist above the servants in a play, while the same pattern ranks a landlord above a tenant in a city. Levine argued that patterns force human beings to act in certain ways; for instance, the "rhythm" of a school bell tells people exactly when to move, and the "network" of the internet dictates who they can talk to. According to Levine, human beings may learn how to spot, use, and change the patterns that control their real lives and their politics by studying patterns in stories. Levine analyzed a variety of works to show how the same patterns exist in both famous art and real-world systems, including The Wire (television) and Bleak House by Charles Dickens, as well as things that are not traditionally art like theme parks and medieval convents. Forms was the focus of a forum in PMLA in 2017.
A methodological guide for scholars, students, and citizens, Levine's fourth monograph, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023), argued for pivoting humanities scholarship toward practical, large-scale activism that influences public, structural change. Building on the theory developed in Forms, Levine proposed applying formalist methods—i.e., the analysis of organizational patterns—to social and physical infrastructures to build systems necessary for collective survival and climate justice. Levine urged all academics to come together and use their influence to avert global catastrophe. At the end of the book, Levine included a practical workbook, titled "Three Weeks to Political Action," which provided a guide for starting structural change.
Reception and critiques Levine's work has been praised for originality, clarity, and connecting form, politics, and the climate. Recurring criticisms, however, include a lack of historical context, treating capitalism as "one of many" patterns rather than a dominant force, and an unclear roadmap for practical activism.
Professor Philip V. Allingham (Lakehead University) observed that Levine's Serious Pleasures of Suspense neglected material, historical, and production-context factors that shaped how Victorian readers actually experienced suspense and narrative doubt. According to Allingham, Levine largely ignored the role of Victorian publishers, serialization, paratextual elements like illustrations, intertextuality, and how these shaped reception.
In her review of Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, Susana Smith Bautista, Ph.D., argued that Levine's elevation of the avant-garde artist as a democratic hero who challenges the mainstream rather than integrating with it pedagogically validates the very snob stereotype of the artist that the book set out to refute. In Bautista's view, Levine also underplayed the role of institutions like museums and glossed over how markets and politics amplify certain forms of provocation.