Jennifer Burns Levin

Jennifer Burns Levin holds a PhD from the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in the literature and culture of modernism, a flourishing of art and social experimentation that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. Though trained as a literary critic, her interests extend from rhetoric into historical and sociological implications of modernism. For her work on Irish author James Joyce and sexuality studies, she has been awarded research fellowships from SUNY-Buffalo, the Chancellor and Regents of the University of California, and the James J. Harvey fund for gay and lesbian studies at U.C. Irvine. She leads a new research interest group (RIG) in food studies for faculty and graduate students through the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society. She also writes, speaks, and teaches in the Eugene community about local cuisine and sustainable food practices. She moonlights as a freelance food journalist, serving as a co-host on "Food for Thought," a radio show on Eugene's NPR affiliate, and writing for various publications and an award-winning local food blog, Culinaria Eugenius. 

Professor Levin's most recent work concerns the way modern writers struggled with and theorized their fleshly desires, often in opposition to the medical profession and obscenity laws. She is editing a book-length manuscript on the intersection of modernism and masochism, and is working on the first draft of a new project on modernist cuisine. Two articles on obscenity studies are forthcoming in edited collections: one on access policies for sexual material in American and British libraries, and another on masochism in the works of American writer and tattoo artist Samuel Steward. A review essay on restaurant culture is forthcoming in Gastronomica. She has been published in Joyce Studies Annual, the James Joyce Quarterly, and the James Joyce Literary Supplement.