
Professor Peggy Levitt - orcid.org/0000-0002-6427-0101
Visiting Research Fellow, May - June 2023
Home Institution: Wellesley College and the Global (De)Centre
Peggy Levitt is Chair of the sociology department and the Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. She is a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Her book “Transnational Social Protection: Transforming Social Welfare in a World on the Move” (co-authored with Erica Dobbs, Ken Sun, and Ruxandra Paul) will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display was published by the University of California Press in 2015.
Peggy co-directed the Transnational Studies Initiative and the Politics and Social Change Workshop at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1998-2020. She has received Honorary Doctoral degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She has held numerous fellowships and guest professorships including, most recently, as a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migration in Paris (2022), a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her earlier books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge 2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (UC Press, 2001).
www.wellesley.edu/sociology/faculty/levitt
Project Title: Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Decentering the World’s Museums, Libraries, and Universities
I will work on two projects during my fellowship. The first is a book, “Move Over, Mona Lisa. Move Over, Jane Eyre: Decentering the World’s Museums, Libraries and Universities.” Across the world, calls for greater equity in the halls of academia, museums, and libraries are loud and clear. Why, then, if everyone agrees that business as usual is no longer acceptable is change so slow? What is really happening on the ground and whose interests does it serve?
My book tells the story of cultural circulation through the inequality pipeline—how artists and writers from Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea gain entrée into the global art and literary worlds, who their entry affects cultural institutions such as museums and book fairs, and how that influences the next generation of art history and comparative literature university classrooms.
My second project is to continue building Global (De)Centre (GDC https://globaldecentre.org/) -- an international network of academics, cultural creators, cultural managers, and people who use art in their activism who are working together to produce, disseminate, teach about, and act upon knowledge in more inclusive ways. I am looking forward to exchanging with like-minded colleagues who share these concerns at IASH and CAHSS.