Wendy Steiner

Dr. Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.

A graduate of McGill University who took her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale, Dr. Steiner is a world-class scholar whose work is also well known to the general public. Her book The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago, 1996) was on the New York Times list of "100 Best Books of 1996." She is widely published in the scholarly and general press, with over 150 articles and reviews on books, painting, architecture, and general culture. She was on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and has been a judge for the National Book Award.

In her latest book, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (The Free Press, 2001), Steiner considers how modernism, in literature and the performing arts, as well as in visual art, replaced beauty with more negative attitudes, such as alienation and anxiety. Her other books include Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990, volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature, and The Colors of Rhetoric (all from University of Chicago Press); and Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (Yale University Press).

Dr. Steiner taught at Yale and the University of Michigan before joining Penn as assistant professor in 1979. Promoted to associate professor three years later, she was named full professor in 1985 and was awarded the Alan G. Hassenfeld Term Professorship of Humanities in 1988 before being appointed the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English in 1993. She has served as master of Penn's Modern Languages College House, director of the Penn/King's College Program in London, and chair of Penn's English Department.

A winner of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies awards, she also has given major lectures and held visiting posts in institutions throughout the United States and Europe. Her special interests are modern literature and criticial theory, relations between literature and the visual arts, and the contemporary American novel.