Wendy Steiner

Richard L. Fisher Professor of English

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wsteiner

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English.

Trained at McGill (B.A.) and Yale (Ph.D.), Dr. Steiner teaches 20-21st-century literature and critical theory, and specializes in interrelations between visual and verbal art. Among her many books are The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (among the "NY Times 100 Best Books of 1996"), Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (2001), and The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010). Dr. Steiner has received awards from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations among others, and her cultural reviews have appeared widely in U. S. and British periodicals, including the New York Times and the London Review of Books. At Penn, she has served as Chair of the English Department, Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, Master of Modern Languages College House, and director of the King's College Program in London. She also writes opera librettos, one of which, The Loathly Lady, had its premiere at Irvine Auditorium in 2009.

Premiere of UPON REFLECTION: AN OPERA IN TEN IMAGES

Interests

20th-Century American Literature 20th-Century British Literature Cinema and Media Studies Modernism and Modernity Poetry and Poetics

Publications

News & Events

2017/09/13

Wendy Steiner: "What We Are Looking At When We Look At Nudes"

2013/03/07

Wendy Steiner in The Nation

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2013

Rafael Walker "Realism after Liberalism: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel"

2008

John P. Heon "The Dionysia of Science: Humor, Rational Madness, and Comic Experimental Methods in the Works of Bruce Nauman and Thomas Pynchon"

1998

Jeannine DeLombard ""Eye-witness to the Cruelty": Literary Abolitionism and the Antebellum Culture of Testimony"

1990

Cynthia Fuchs "Gazing: Gender, Performance, and Representation in Film"

1989

Laura Tanner "Speaking in Forms: The Discourse of Violence in 20th Century Fiction"

1988

David Heddendorf "William James and the Rhetoric of Popular Philosophy"

Thomas E. Yingling "Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text"

Courses Taught

spring 2012

ENGL 074.001 Contemporary American Literature

ENGL 591.301 Contemporary Issues in the Arts

fall 2011

ENGL 104.401 The 20th Century

ENGL 295.301 Adaptation

spring 2010

ENGL 274.302 The Fiction/Nonfiction Perplex

fall 2009

ENGL 591.401 The Model

spring 2009

ENGL 295.402 The Tip of the Iceberg: What Goes Into the Making of a Work of Art?

fall 2008

ENGL 274.301 Contemporary American Fiction

fall 2007

ENGL 571.401 Literary Theory

spring 2007

ENGL 261.301 Controversies in the Arts

fall 2006

ENGL 591.401 Contemporary Issues in the Arts

spring 2006

ENGL 274.302 Contemporary American Fiction

fall 2005

ENGL 016.301 Topics in Literature

spring 2005

ENGL 074.001 Contemporary American Literature

fall 2004

ENGL 591.401 The Idea of the Model in Literature and Art

spring 2004

ENGL 591.401 The Idea of the Model in Literature and Art

fall 2002

ENGL 591.301 Modernism and the Question of Beauty

spring 1998

ENGL 293.401 Topics in Literature and Society

fall 1996

ENGL 201.306 Major British Writers

spring 1996

ENGL 104.001 The Twentieth Century

spring 1995

ENGL 285.301 Topics in Contemporary American Literature

fall 1994

ENGL 104.001 The Twentieth Century

fall 1979

ENGL 010.001 Great Novels

ENGL 084.001 American Writers from 1900