Dr. Caroline Levander is author, most recently, of Invent Ed: How An American Tradition of Innovation Can Transform College Today (2025) as well as numerous other books including Hotel Life (2015), Where Is American Literature? (2013), 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). 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 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 Strategy, 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 developed and opened the University’s first international hub, Rice’s Paris Center, and most recently has launched Rice Global India. She has built Rice Online Learning, which develops online courseware that reaches millions of new learners around the world. Beyond Rice, Levander has held many leadership positions in higher education including the Coursera Council, EdX/2U Advisory Council, Fulbright Association Chair, Board of Directors, and Venice International University Board of Trustees. 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 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.