PhD, Film, Literature, and Culture, University of Southern California;
BA, English and Film, University of Colorado

The central focus of my research and teaching is on how media-old and new-transform both everyday experience and expanded global, political spheres. As part of my work as a media historian and theorist, I am interested in film, video, digital media, animation, literature, cultural theory, and science and technology studies. My research is motivated by a search for intersections between only apparently divergent domains. Similarly, in my courses, I encourage students to connect their daily engagements with media of all kinds to the archaeologies and larger social structures and forces that inform them.

My current project considers cinema-from its pre-history into its digital age-as an animatic apparatus: From eighteenth-century tableaux vivants to early cinema to anime, I investigate how  media technologies and texts influence and even create conceptions of life, namely, the ways in which we distinguish animate beings from inanimate ones, organic from inorganic, the lively from the inert. I also consider how media affect contemporary political debates on the proper beginnings, endings, and usages of biopolitical “life.” An essay of mine that examines the convergence of media and biopolitics is forthcoming in a volume on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben (University of Edinburgh Press, 2008).

Introduction to Media Studies
Inventing the Human
Ethnographic Film
New European Cinemas
Jews and American Popular Culture

• “Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture’” in Law, Life, Literature: The Work of Giorgio Agamben, ed. Justin Clemens, Nick Heron and Alex Murray, University of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming October 2008.
• “Image as Gesture: the Saint in Chrome Dioxide,” Spectator (Spring 2001): 23-39.
• “’This Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation’: Antonin Artaud’s Ontology of ‘Live’” Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, vol. 4, Summer 2000. http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/levitt.html
• “Heidegger and the Theater of Truth” Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, vol. 1, Falll 1998. http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/1/levitt.html

Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

72 5th avenue, Rm. 304
New York, NY 10011

• “Media and Biopolitics: The Animatic Apparatus,” CCLF Conference, “Logics of the Living,” Cornell University, October 2007.
• “Gestural Disorder and the Optical Girl Machine, or, Notes on Cinematic Life,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago. March 2007.
•  “ZoeTropes, or, The Animatic Apparatus,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Vancouver March 2006.
• “Image as Gesture,” Invited Speaker, Plenary Panel: “Film and Translation,” Western Humanities Association Conference, Irvine, California, October 2002.
•  “Reading Gesture: Ekphrasis in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” Panel: (Dis)Orientations, with Bernard Stiegler, International Association of Word and Image Studies Conference, Hamburg, Germany, July 2002.
• “ZoeTropes: Mediality, Modernism, and the Ethics of Gesture,” 5th Annual Comparative Literature Symposium with respondent Giorgio Agamben, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, April 2002.
• “Vital Signs: Diderot and Artaud on Spectacle,” 3rd Annual Comparative Literature Symposium with respondent Martin Jay, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, March 2000.
• “Duchamp’s Drive (Through the Large Glass)” Panel: Philosophical Pictures, organized and moderated by W.J.T. Mitchell and Daniel Tiffany, International Association of Word and Image Studies Conference, Pomona, California, March 1999.