Christine Levecq, Ph.D.

Christine Levecq’s research is about the lives and thought of people in the African diaspora. Her first book, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850 (UP of New England, 2008) analyzes the ways in which black writers in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- century America and Britain appealed to their readers’ feelings in order to convey certain political ideas. Her second book, Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution (U of Virginia P, 2019), is about people of African descent in the French, Dutch, and English eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and how they used notions of community—both national and international—to fight the prejudices of their times. In these works, as well as in various articles published in peer-reviewed journals, her purpose is to show that black writers are informed by contemporary currents of thought, but often push them in progressive, even radical, directions.

Christine Levecq’s main teaching goal is to sharpen her students’ critical-thinking skills. Students read texts and interpret them, so they can see that language is never neutral, that it always conveys particular ideas and ways of seeing the world. Her hope is that students can then export these interpretive skills to their own lives—as students, as professionals, as citizens. She encourages subtlety and insightfulness in her students’ writing; she tries to convey the thrill of intellectual journeys, of thinking in new ways. While many of her classes deal with issues of race and ethnicity, all of them are about encountering the ideas and values of different cultures, and hence about questioning one’s own.