The West Virginia University Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will launch the inaugural lecture in the Eberly Family Lecture series with a presentation by Robert S. Levine, professor of American literature at the University of Maryland .

His discussion,Douglass, Revolution and Haiti : 1857-1861,is scheduled for noon Friday, Feb. 24, in the Greenbrier Room of the Mountainlair.

Professor Levine will also meet with a small group of graduate students for a workshop on publishing and on current directions in the field of American literary studies.

Levine is the author ofConspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville( Cambridge , 1989) andMartin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity(North Carolina, 1997).

Included among the nine books he has edited areMartin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader( North Carolina , 2003),The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville( Cambridge , 1998),Cultural Edition’of William Wells Brown’s Clotel( Bedford , 2000), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’sDred(Penguin, 2000). He has published over 40 articles and reviews in numerous journals and collections, and has served on the editorial boards of some of the most important journals in the field.

Professor Levine is currently editor of the 1820-1865 volume ofThe Norton Anthology of American Literature,forthcoming in 2007.

For more information, contact John Ernest, Department of English, at 304-293-3107, ext. 33456.