David J. Levin
· Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Theater & Performance Studies, and the CollegeUniversity of Chicago · Germanic Studies
Active 1987–2023
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About
David J. Levin is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Theater & Performance Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago. He joined the department in 1998 and has since contributed extensively to the fields of opera studies, theater and performance studies, cinema studies, dance studies, and German literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. His work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance across various media, including opera, theater, film, and dance, with a particular interest in the interpretive work that performance occasions. Levin has written extensively about Wagner and the stakes of staging, while his research also encompasses a broad range of genres and periods. In addition to his academic pursuits, he has served as a dramaturg for opera houses in Germany and the United States and has collaborated with choreographers such as William Forsythe and Saar Magal.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Art
- Visual arts
- Sociology
- Communication
- World Wide Web
- Library science
- Programming language
- Art history
Selected publications
Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky
2007-10-01 · 37 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingRichard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2014-12-25 · 21 citations
book1st authorCorresponding2017-07-05 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCanadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan offers a strong reading of Richard Strauss's opera, one willing to raise a number of questions about the work and its accrued meanings. At the same time, his production refuses to reproduce a conventional account of the eponymous heroine as a cunning little vixen. If this was a scandalous Salome, then in large part it was because it was not a familiar one. Opera critics, like opera audiences, are not yet entirely literate in the growing number of re-readings that a…
Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen
Princeton University Press eBooks · 2014-12-31 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingMusical, Un-Musical, Undo-Sical
Portable Gray · 2023
Frequent coauthors
- 3 shared
D. S. Kirk
- 2 shared
Patrick A. Langan
Demos
- 2 shared
David K. Peterson
- 2 shared
Michael R. Pouy
- 2 shared
Christopher Johnson
- 2 shared
Vitali Volovoi
- 2 shared
Mark Schönbächler
- 2 shared
Rachel C. Morowitz
Logistics Management Institute (United States)
Awards & honors
- Senior Advisor to the Provost for Arts (2018-2023)
- Founding Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at…
- Assistant Professor of German and Theater Studies at Columbi…
- executive editor of the Opera Quarterly (2005-2015)
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