Vance Byrd Named Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Vance Byrd will join Penn Arts & Sciences as a Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures on January 1, 2022. 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.

The Presidential Professorships are five-year term chairs, awarded by University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann to outstanding scholars, whose appointments to the standing faculty are approved by the Provost and who demonstrably contribute excellence and diversity to Penn’s inclusive community.