Naomi Levine Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. She received her PhD from Rutgers University.

She works on Victorian literature, poetry and poetics, literary historiography, and the history of criticism. Her current research explores the relationship between formal and historical conceptions of poetry in the nineteenth century and after. Levine is completing a book manuscript called The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry and Critical Method, 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 close reading. She is also at work on a related project, “The Badness of Victorian Poetry,” about twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems.

Her essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, Victorian Literature and Culture, MLQ, and Literature Compass.

Publications

• “Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott,” Victorian Poetry 54.4 (Winter 2016): 439-454
• “Victorian Pearl: Tennysonian Elegy and the Return of a Medieval Poem,” Victoriographies 6.3 (Fall 2016): 238-255
• “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Historiographical Poetics,” MLQ 77.1 (Spring 2016): 81-104
• “Trebled Beauty: William Morris’s Terza Rima,” Victorian Studies 53.3 (Spring 2011): 506-517
• “Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics,” Literature Compass 17.7 (2020)
• “Rhyme,” Keywords issue, Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/7 (2018)