Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Marcus Levitt graduated from Haverford College with a double major in Russian and History. In 1984 he received a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Columbia University, where he also took a certificate in Russian Studies. Before coming to USC, he taught in Columbia's Humanities Program and served for a year as Visiting Professor at Duke University. He has spent several years living and doing research in Russia and the former Soviet Union, on grants from IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) and on a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Grant. He has also spent time as a visiting fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Studies in Washington, D.C. and at Harvard University's Russian Research Center.

Dr. Levitt teaches various levels of the Russian language, and a broad range of courses on Russian literature and culture (including courses on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Russian novel, the Russian short story, and on Russian "thought and civilization"). He has also taught in the Thematic Options program, in Comparative Literature, and developed courses in the Multi-Media Literacy Program and for the Political Violence Initiative. Dr. Levitt helped establish USC's doctoral program in Russian literature and culture, and regularly teaches graduate courses on medieval and eighteenth-century Russian literature, the Russian novel, and the history of Russian literary criticism.

Dr. Levitt is known for both his work on eighteenth-century Russian culture and on Pushkin. Broadly speaking, his research has focused on the problems of establishing a “modern” western European style literature in Russia. His first book, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, published by Cornell University Press in 1989, earned him USC's Phi Kappa Phi All-University Honor Society Faculty Recognition Award, and has been translated into Russian and published in Russia. The book examines Alexander Pushkin's posthumous rise to fame as Russia's "national poet" and analyzes the special place literature came to play in Russia cultural and political life.

A collection of his articles on eighteenth-century Russian literature is now under preparation by St. Petersburg University Press. Dr. Levitt edited and contributed to Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, volume 150 in the series The Dictionary of Literary Biography (1995). This fundamental reference work features articles by leading international experts, and breaks new ground both in re-defining the period--as “early modern”--and in expanding the canon to include ecclesiastical and women writers.

Prof. Levitt has written a series of articles on the writer Alexander Sumarokov, as well as on such other eighteenth-century greats as Lomonosov, Radishchev, Princess Dashkova,
and Catherine the Great. Dr. Levitt's work on Catherine includes an analysis of her defense of Russian culture against a particularly nasty attack by a French scientist who claimed the Russians as a race lack sufficient "nervous juice" due to the cold climate! He has also done a translation and discussion of her work as a satirical journalist, which appeared in the award-winning collection Russian Women Writers, volume 1, edited by Christine Tomei (New York, 1999).

The new freedom in Russia has also allowed new opportunities for travel and research, and Dr. Levitt has taken part in several folklore expeditions to Siberia. In June-July 2000, Dr. Levitt co-organized a joint Russian-American expedition to Transbaikal, Siberia, to record folk songs of the Semeiskie Old Believers. He and Prof. Richard McIlvery of the Thornton School of Music received a USC Undergraduate Research Grant to fund the expedition, which included three USC undergraduates; there were seven Russian members of the team, led by folklorist Vladimir Kliauz of the Institute of World Literature and the Heritage Institute, both in Moscow. A CD of songs they recorded in the village of Ukyr was published in Russia (see image), and a multi-media CD on the Semeiskie was also produced. His photos of the expedition have appeared in such diverse venues as the Russian magazine Zhivaia starina and USC's Trojan Family Magazine (the photos on the CD jacket are also his!). Click here for his Notes on an Expedition to the Semeiskie of Transbaikal and his Photo Album from the trip.

Dr. Levitt's forthcoming publications include a collection of essays which he co-edited with Tatiana Novikova of the University of Nebraska, entitled Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture, to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He has also contributed a chapter on Dashkova for the catalogue accompanying the exhibit The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin, and the Age of Enlightenment, to open at the American Philosophical Society in 2006.

His current projects, apart from work on a full critical edition of Sumarokov, is a long-awaited monograph, provisionally entitled Making Russia Visible: The Status of the Visual in Eighteenth-century Russian Literature, several chapters of which have already appeared as articles.

Dr. Levitt has served as Book Editor for The Slavic and East European Journal, one of the leading American scholarly reviews in the field of Russian language and literature. He is on the editorial board of Slavic Review, The Slavic and East European Journal, and The Pushkin Review. He is a founding member of both the North American Pushkin Society (NAPS) and the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association (ECRSA). He is also member of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS); the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL); American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS); American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR); the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS); the North American Dostoevsky Society; the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia (SGECR); American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS); and Phi Beta Kappa. Lastly, for those of you who have gotten this far, he proposes to found an AAA (Association for the Abolition of Acronyms).

 

 

Much of Dr. Levitt's research has centered on eighteenth-century Russian literature and culture. Several of his studies have appeared in Russian in the distinguished series XVIII vek (The Eighteenth Century) published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and also in The Slavic and Eastern European Journal and Eighteenth-Century Studies.