Christine Levecq

Professor of Humanities

Christine Levecq’s research focuses on the lives and thoughts of individuals in the African diaspora. Her first book, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850 (UP of New England, 2008) analyzes the ways in which black writers in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America and Britain appealed to their readers’ feelings in order to convey certain political ideas. Her second book, Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution (U of Virginia P, 2019), is about people of African descent in the French, Dutch, and English eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and how they used notions of community—both national and international—to fight the prejudices of their times. In these works, as well as in various articles published in peer-reviewed journals, her purpose is to show that black writers are informed by contemporary currents of thought, but often push them in progressive, even radical, directions.