Naomi Levine, assistant professor of English at Yale University, has won the 2024 Book Prize for Best First Book in the Field from the North American Victorian Studies Association for her debut monograph, The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History (2024). The award-winning book examines nineteenth-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for Victorian poetry and the development of literary studies.
A Yale faculty member since 2017, Dr. Levine is a scholar of poetry and poetics, aesthetics, and the history of criticism. She is currently working on her second book, Badness in Poetry, which discusses the entanglements of judgment, pleasure, and interpretation in the study of poetry. Before coming to Yale, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Dr. Levine holds four degrees in English literature: a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto, a master’s degree from McGill University in Montreal, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. both from Rutgers University in New Jersey.