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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

Since joining the faculty at Chicago, David Levin has taught courses in German Cinema (e.g., Weimar Cinema; German Cinema 1945-1989; Fassbinder: Melodrama, Politics, and Poetics; The Cinema of Catastrophe), on theories of spectacle; performance theory; and the intersections of cinema, theater, and opera. Recently, his research and teaching have been organized around questions of performance and spectatorship, especially the institutional and ideological histories of absorption. In addition to Levin's academic work, he has spent a number of years working as a dramaturg, mostly in Germany, (e.g., at the Frankfurt Opera, the Bremen Opera, and the Frankfurt Ballet) but also, more recently, at Lyric Opera of Chicago and for opera cabal, an avant-garde opera company based in New York and Chicago. For the past five years, he has served as the executive editor of the Opera Quarterly (published by Oxford University Press). From 2007-2010, he served as Co-Director of the MAPH Program at the University of Chicago. In the Spring of 2010 Levin hosted, alongside Christopher Wild, "Praxes of Theory", an international conference at Chicago that brought together artists and scholars form Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance practice and performance theory.

For more information, please visit his faculty profile.

Featured Project

Projects

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: