Caroline Levine; David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities and author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network; participated in a talk with Nonprofit Quarterly on "Exploring Hierarchy as Form:"
"Part of the problem of hierarchies is that they feed on each other. So, we have gender hierarchy, a race hierarchy, a wealth hierarchy, and then also an institutional power hierarchy—and look! They look the same! The people at the top look like the white, straight, male, wealthy people, right? This isn’t an accident; the hierarchies are supporting one another. But we can deplete or address the injustice of hierarchies while preserving some of the things that they do well by introducing other forms."
See the full article and video here.
Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for the understanding of forms and structures as crucial to understanding links between art and society. She is the author of three books, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). She is currently the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature and has written on topics ranging from formalist theory to Victorian poetry and from television serials to academic freedom. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before coming to Cornell, where she was co-founder of the Mellon World Literatures Workshop. She is a native of Syracuse, NY.
