Caroline Levander works at the intersection of American culture & higher education innovation.
My Background
Author
As the author of five books, five edited collections, and numerous articles on transnational and hemispheric American culture, I have deep expertise on the long history and politics of American life.
Professor
I hold the Carlson endowed chair in the humanities, which acknowledges and supports a senior faculty member whose scholarly collaborations, research accomplishments, and publications exemplify innovation and entrepreneurial leadership and whose research is building important new fields of humanistic inquiry.
Academic Thought Leader
Beyond Rice, I serve as the Vice Chair of the Fulbright Association Board of Directors, as well as on numerous ed tech advisory boards such as Coursera Council and 2U/EdX . The ed tech company that I co-founded in 2020 was acquired by Honor Education in 2022 where I am a senior advisor.
Vice President
I serve on Rice University’s senior leadership as Vice President for Global and am responsible for expanding the university's global impact through the development of new international campuses, academic programs, partnerships, and research collaborations. My administrative leadership focuses on educational innovation, strategic growth, and institutional transformation, all with a focus on global impact.
Explore my books
“A dazzling, carefully crafted, and beautifully written book, full of original insights”
Howard Gillette
“Written in a lively, conversational tone, this is that rare work of criticism that manages to be at once illuminating and pleasurable to read”
Rachel Adams
“Imaginatively combining history, literature, politics, visual culture, and transnational American studies,” Levander ..offers intriguing insights into race, nation, and belonging”
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Nominated for American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize and for the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize.
(Choice Essential Book)
“These superb essays represent cutting edge contributions to the burgeoning field of transnational and hemispheric studies.”
Emory Elliot
“Essential for all students in all disciplines of the liberal Arts”
Choice Recommended Book
My current book project
MIT Press, coming in late 2024
What is the point of American higher education today?
Before American universities became the envy of the world, the nation’s first scholars developed a well-honed and unorthodox capacity for discovery, invention, and creative problem-solving. Undisciplined: How America’s Tradition of Invention Can Transform College Today tells the story of how this particular capacity became a distinguishing characteristic of the young nation.
Despite this, Undisciplined describes how challenges to the nation’s inventive method gradually took root in the halls of the country’s finest universities and thus how the method that their most notable inventors had perfected became an unintended casualty of universities’ changing priorities.
This failure now threatens to have dire consequences for the nation’s capacity to innovate, invent, and discover. Regardless of differing opinions about what the future of work will look like, it is abundantly clear that we are now in a world in which employers need a deeply creative work force—people who are able to respond to the unexpected and develop new solutions amidst an accelerated pace of change.
Undisciplined provides achievable solutions to the quandary now confronting American universities and the students who rightly expect that a university education will prepare them for many decades of meaningful employment.
Recent Selected Writings
“American Studies @ Scale,” in Neither the Time Nor the Place: Today’s Nineteenth Century
Eds. Susan Gillman and Christopher Castiglia
“Tires”, in Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions
Inside Higher Ed Series: Education in the Time of Corona