Naomi Levine
Biography
Naomi Levine is a scholar of poetry and poetics, aesthetics, and the history of criticism, specializing in the nineteenth century. She is the author of The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History(Chicago, 2024), which examines nineteenth-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for the theory and practice of Victorian poetry and for the development of literary studies. She is currently at work on a second project, “Badness in Poetry,” which begins from twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems. In theorizing and historicizing the aesthetic category of “badness,” this project considers the entanglements of judgment, pleasure, and interpretation in the study of poetry more broadly. Levine is assistant professor of English at Yale University and was previously a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.