Bohemia in America,
1858-1920

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Dr. Joanna Levin

Associate Professor of English, Department of English - Chapman University

2003-present

SHC 112, Chapman University, 1 University Dr., Orange, CA 92866
(714) 997-6534
jlevin@chapman.edu
B.A., Yale University; Ph.D., Stanford University

Joanna Levin received her B.A. in American Studies at Yale University and her Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. She teaches a wide range of courses in American literature and culture, as well as in literary theory and criticism. Her book, Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2010) explores the construction and emergence of “Bohemia” in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a culture nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie boheme traveled to the United States from Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Bohemia in America follows la vie boheme from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Joanna Levin’s article "Lady Macbeth and the Daemonologie of Hysteria" (a study of the development of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category in Renaissance England) appeared in ELH, Spring 202. She began teaching at Chapman in 2003.