Emancipation Day Lecture: Robert S. Levine, “Frederick Douglass’s Tales of Abraham Lincoln”

Drawing from his forthcoming book, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard, 2016), Levine will discuss the image of Lincoln emerging from Douglass’s personal and public writing. Levine will revise the mythical ideas of a Lincoln-Douglass “bromance” and instead shed light on a complex relationship that altered the course of history

A force in American and African American literature, Levine is the author of books such as 1997's Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and 2008's Dislocating Race and Nation. He has produced scholarly editions from a range of important writers, William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe among them. He sits on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, andJ19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He has edited numerous critical volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Recent awards include a 2012-13 NEH Senior Fellowship and a 2013-14 Guggenheim Fellowship. Levine was awarded the MLA’s 2013 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

Click here for more information.