Levi Walls is a PhD candidate in music theory at the University of North Texas, where his related field of study is English literature.

Due to either curiosity or intense restlessness, Levi’s research interests cover a variety of areas within the wider humanities, including opera hermeneutics, interactions between literary theory and music theory, issues of identity in music theory pedagogy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. His research has been presented at various graduate, regional, and national conferences, including the Society for Music Theory.

Levi’s dissertation is a genealogical study of organicism that utilizes various interdisciplinary critical lenses to analyze organicism’s progression through three distinct historical phases. Specifically, the idea that human creations should mirror nature started life as a mere Platonic analogy that is eventually reified via the notion of genius in the midst of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anxieties over European male superiority and the ontological status of art; subsequently, the influence of Schenkerian and thematicist ideologies upon the formation of the music theory discipline in the mid-twentieth century managed to grant the once-influential organicist ideology a sustained—albeit insular—afterlife, long after literary theory reconsidered its own organicist mores in favor of the expansion of poststructuralist methodologies.