Vance Byrd

Vance Byrd is the Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Byrd is a scholar of late-18th- and 19th-century German cultural studies, the history of the book and periodicals, literature and visual media, Black studies, and environmental humanities. He is the author of A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, and has co-edited two books and two special issues of journals. His new co-edited collection, Queer Print Cultures, is forthcoming. Byrd’s research has been supported by grants from the National Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, and the Getty Research Institute. In 2019, he was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is currently on the editorial boards of Monatshefte, The German Quarterly, and the Signale book series at Cornell University Press. He comes to Penn from Grinnell College.