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Faculty Fellow

David Levin

Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

David J. Levin is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Distinguished Service Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, theater and cinema. From 2011-2016 he served as the founding Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and from 2018-2023 he served as the Senior Advisor to the Provost for Arts. David has served as a guest professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the Free University of Berlin as well as the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Konstanz, Mainz, and Oslo. Along with Mary Ann Smart (UC Berkeley), he co-edits the book series OperaLab for the University of Chicago Press. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, David has worked extensively as a dramaturg and collaborator for opera, theater, and dance productions in Germany and the United States, working with, among others, Robert Altman, Ruth Berghaus, and William Forsythe.

For more information, please visit his faculty profile.

Featured Project

Projects

The Voice Project II

The Voice Project II

This project extended an interdisciplinary dialogue on the role of voice: as metaphor, instrument, and object of theoretical inquiry

The Voice Project was initiated in 2013-14 by an interdisciplinary group of faculty members at the University of Chicago keen to explore how voice has come to serve as the vector of numerous questions – philosophical, theoretical, medial, and material – that have pressed on current-day...

Project Team:

The Voice Project

The Voice Project

This project supported vigorous dialogue about the role of voice—its ontological, material, technical, and embodied nature—across disciplines, from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to linguistics, music, literature, and beyond.

The Voice Project was initiated in 2013-14 by an interdisciplinary group of faculty members at the University of Chicago keen to explore how voice has come to serve as the vector of numerous questions – philosophical, theoretical, medial, and material – that have pressed on current-day...

Project Team: