City College Scholar/Director
Chosen Cultural Affairs Commissioner by Mayor

It is just possible that the appearance of Kate Levin's book-in-progress, currently titled "Genre Trouble: The Masque and English Renaissance Drama," is going to be delayed a little. It is also something of a stretch to imagine she will be continuing to direct highly successful student productions at City College of such rarities from Renaissance drama as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Gallathea, and The Law Against Lovers.

For the Assistant Professor of English and (since 1997) Associate Director of the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities at City College has just been appointed by Mayor Michel Bloomberg to succeed Schuyler Chapin as New York City's Commissioner for Cultural Affairs.

A glance at Levin's curriculum vitae reveals why the Mayor's choice should not come as a surprise. The Harvard B.A. in History and Literature and U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. in English worked for three years as Director of Special Projects at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, perhaps the most innovative cultural institution in the city, and she will also find her way around City Hall very easily. Before returning to school to earn her doctorate, Levin was for three years an Assistant Chief of Staff in the office of Mayor Ed Koch.

Commissioner Levin, seated center, with her CCNY cast for The Basset Table on the stage of Aaron Davis Hall last April. Levin believes this was the New York premiere of the 1705 play by Anna Centlivre.

Levin's tenure as Commissioner began on Jan. 28; she is taking a leave of absence from City College and fully expects to return to campus after her sojourn downtown. Reached at her campus office a few days after the announcement, Levin said one of her main concerns while in office will be to emphasize and exploit “the many ways the missions of New York City's cultural and educational institutions overlap.”

Levin's work on the masque, an elaborate theatrical spectacle that flourished from the late 16th century through the Restoration, has been focused on disassociating the genre from its beginnings as courtly entertainment and emphasizing, instead, its "pluralist" identity as civic pageantry. Perhaps there is a future for masquing (as opposed to masking) at City Hall.