Teacher / Researcher / Writer
My name is Levi Thompson, and I have a BA in History and Government from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains. I also have an MA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Arabic Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. My dissertation, Speaking Laterally: Transnational Poetics and the Rise of Modern Arabic and Persian Poetry in Iraq and Iran (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bq9v3sc), brought together the theoretical richness of Comparative Literature and the philological rigor of Area Studies to critically investigate the development of literary modernism in the Middle East. After completing my PhD in 2017, I was the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, where I was a member of the Pembroke Seminar organized by Leela Gandhi on the topic “The Cultures of Pacifism.”
I’m currently an assistant professor of Arabic and Persian literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’ve been since 2021. Prior to that, I was an assistant professor of Arabic at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2018-2021.
My monograph is published by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in World Literature series, edited by Debjani Ganguly and Francesca Orsini. See this link for a discussion of the series that I participated in, and use the code RMAPP2022 for 20% off the book @ www.cambridge.org/9781009164474.
Research Interests:
Arabic and Persian literature, modernism and modernity, Cold War cultures
Follow me on Twitter (@tlthom) and Instagram (@levithompsongram)