Lital Levy’s work intersects with comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory, and intellectual history.
At Princeton, Levy has taught in the areas of Hebrew and Arabic literatures, Jewish literature and culture, Middle Eastern Jewish history, world literature, and critical theory. Recent graduate seminars include a course on the comparative poetics of “passing” and masquerade (African-American, Jewish-American, LGBTQ and Israeli-Palestinian literature film) and on the idea of the Arab Jew.
Levy’s book Poetic Trespass (Princeton University Press, 2014), was the recipient of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, the 2014 Salo Baron Prize, and the 2015 MLA Prize for a First Book. Her current book project The Jewish Nahda, is an intellectual history of Arab Jews from 1863-1948. The third book is provisionally titled Global Haskalah: Jewish Cultural Modernity, Translation, and World Literature; this project will offer a new approach to the Haskalah by exploring the dynamic interaction of Jewish languages (Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Hebrew, and Yiddish) and routes of cultural circulation, translation, and exchange among Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi communities of the 19th through early 20th centuries.
In 2019-2020, Levy was ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
