Joshua Leavitt is a Distinguished University Fellow specializing in nineteenth-century American literature. His dissertation examines how novels of the Gilded Age advanced a range of competing ideas about the police and municipal criminal justice systems.
In addition to assisting in American literature survey and special topics courses, Leavitt has taught first- and second-year writing as well as Introduction to Fiction. He typically focuses on historical fiction, true-crime fiction, detective stories and prison literature. His courses have also entailed archival research and digital composition. Most recently, he helped implement the department's first entirely web-based iteration of Introduction to Fiction, which explored short fiction published in online literary magazines.
By way of academic service, Leavitt has held positions on the department's Undergraduate Studies Committee, the Council of Graduate Students, the graduate caucus of the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective at Ohio State and the Committee on Academic Misconduct.
