Dr. Caroline Levander is author, most recently, of Hotel Life (2015) and Where Is American Literature? (2013) and is currently completing Undisciplined: Invention, Ingenuity and American Higher Education (MIT Press). Her writing and teaching have focused on transnationalism, race and gender relations, and, most recently, the future of higher education and the disciplines. In addition to co-editing a book series, Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, Levander is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke UP, 2006) and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (Cambridge UP, 1998, paperback reprint 2009). She has co-edited A Companion to American Literary Studies (2011), Teaching and Studying in the Americas (2010), Hemispheric American Studies (2008), "The Global South and World Disorder" (2011), and The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (2003).
As Vice President for Global, Dr. Levander is responsible for expanding the university's global impact through the development of new degrees, academic programs, partnerships, and research collaborations. She has built Rice Online Learning, which develops online courseware that reaches millions of new learners around the world. Levander sits on the Coursera Council and the EdX/2U Advisory Council, among other advisory boards. She works closely with university leaders and faculty to develop and expand international research centers such as the Rice-IITK Collaborative Center in Kanpur and Rice’s Paris Center. She is on the Fulbright Association Board of Directors, serving as Vice Chair. The ed-tech company that Levander co-founded in 2020 was acquired by Honor Education in 2022, where she is a senior advisor to the company that brings Apple design and engineering experience to digital teaching and learning tools.
Dr. Levander has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to lead an international summit on the Future Global University, and has spoken at the Aspen Institute, as well as other national and international summits on the future of higher education. Levander completed a 2017 Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Exeter as well as a 2016 Senior Fellow at the the Freie Universität Graduate School, Berlin. She is the recipient of additional grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Brown Foundation, the Moody Foundation, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science's National Leadership grant.