Professor Levin’s teaching and research focus on postcolonial writing and the environmental humanities, with a particular focus on selfhood and contemporary culture. His early work examined the representation of adventure travel in global literature and the relationship between leisure travel practices and colonial ideologies. This research led to his first book, The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel: The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization (Routledge, 2008). In his current work, Professor Levin examines modern forms of self-fashioning in the contexts of global environmental crises, marked by habitat loss, rising temperatures, eroding coastlines, and mass extinctions. Recent publications consider extinction as a problem of memory, scale, and temporality in global fiction; how leatherback sea turtles both threaten and disrupt the time of capitalism, which is partly based on his field research in northeast Trinidad; and theories of disappearance in the climate-change era—relating material disappearances such as coastal erosion and habitat loss to the decline of cognitive and cultural capacities. This latter concern forms the basis of his current book project,`Figures of Disappearance: Selfhood in an Era of Mass Extinction’. Professor Levin has recently taught courses on literary animals, Global South ecologies, ecofictions, and literary theories of the environment. He is the co-founder of Clark’s concentration in the Environmental Humanities.
Stephen Levin
Associate Professor, English
Director of Graduate Studies, English
- About
- Scholarly and creative works
- Awards and grants
Degrees
- Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Culture, History, and Theory, Emory University, 2005
- B.A. in , Wesleyan University, 1993
Affiliated Department
Scholarly and creative works
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Negative Tidalectics: Remembering Extinction in Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man With the Compound Eyes
Modern Fiction StudiesFall2027 -
Review essay on The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti (NYU Press, 2025).
H-Net (Peer Reviewed) -
`CHARISMATIC SPECIES’ AND THE EXTINCTION OF WORLDS: SEA TURTLES AND MULTISPECIES NARRATIVES IN THE CARIBBEAN’
Association for the Study of Literature and EnvironmentCollege Park, MDJuly2025Sponsored by Association for the Study of LIterature and Environment -
Negative Tidalectics: Oceanic Selfhood and the Trash Vortex in Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes
Modern Language AssociationNew Orleans, LAJanuary2025Sponsored by Provost/Higgins -
`Current Research Concerns in the Environmental Humanities’; one of four faculty presenters on panel
Higgins Environmental Humanities SymposiumClark UniversityNovember2024Sponsored by Higgins School -
Sea Turtles and the Role Charismatic Creatures Play in Environmental Humanities
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Like a Patient Etherized: Death Drive and The Commons
Association for the Study of Literature and the EnvironmentPortland, OregonSpring2023Sponsored by Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment -
Discussant for Environmental Humanities Symposium. (Organized Event with three invited speakers and acted as discussant for second hour)
Environmental Humanities Symposium (Higgins School of Humanities)Clark UnivNovember2022 -
Discussant on panel at Clark to mark release of Ousmane Power-Greene’s novel _The Confessions of Matthew Strong_.
The Confessions of Matthew Strong (Novel)Clark UnivFall2022 -
The Doomsday Vault: Narrative and the Liberation of Radiant Life
American Comparative Literature AssociationChicago, ILMarch2020Sponsored by American Comparative Literature Association -
Figures of Disappearance: Selfhood in an Era of Mass Extinction (Consolidated and Revised MS of Book Project)
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Allegories of Capital: Postcolonial Melancholy in Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals and Zadie Smith’s NW
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`Vanishing Ecologies: The Entanglement of Leatherbacks and Ecotourism on the Grande Riviere Coast in Trinidad’
Environmental Humanities
Awards and grants
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Island and Ocean Studies: Narratives from Barbados
Higgins School of Humanities
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Environmental Humanities Symposium
Higgins School of Humanities (Linking Grant)
Sep. 1, 2022 – Dec. 15, 2022
