Robert S. Levine is a scholar of American and African American literature. He is currently Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Levine received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1975 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1981.^[1][2] His research focuses on 19th-century American literature, especially on the life and works of Frederick Douglass.^[3] He sits on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals including American Literary History and Journal of American Studies and serves as General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.^[4]

• Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (1989)
• Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997)
• The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, editor (1998)
• Dislocating Race and Nation (2008)
• Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, editor, with Samuel Otter (2008)
• The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, editor (2014)
• The Heroic Slave [a story by Frederick Douglass]: A Cultural and Critical Edition, co-edited with John Stauffer and John R. McKivigan (2015)
• The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016)
• Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2018)
• The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (2021) Review

• Outstanding Book Award from Choice Reviews magazine in 1997
• 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship
• 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship

• 2014 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement