Levi Thompson is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center at Brown University, where he was a member of the Pembroke Seminar “Cultures of Pacifism” (2017-2018). He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA, where he wrote his dissertation, “Speaking Laterally: Transnational Poetics and the Rise of Modern Arabic and Persian Poetry in Iraq and Iran” (2017). Levi's first monograph, Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry, was published in December 2022 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently at work on an edited volume titled The Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism.
Discipline
Literature
Sub Areas
Arabic
Islamic Studies
Middle East/Near East Studies
Translation
Persian
Transnationalism
Comparative
Modern
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Egypt
Iran
Iraq
Islamic World
Specialties
Arabic Literature
Persian Literature
Modernism
Languages
Arabic (fluent)
Persian (advanced)
German (intermediate)
French (intermediate)
Russian (elementary)
Education
PhD
| 2017
| NELC
| UCLA
MA
| 2009
| Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
| University of Pennsylvania
BA
| 2007
| History, Government
| The College of William and Mary
