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 MPhil and PhD from Yale, Dr. Steiner's fields are modern literature and critical theory, relations between visual and verbal art, and the contemporary novel. Her book The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press) was listed by the New York Times among the "100 Best Books of 1996." Her latest book is Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (Free Press), published in Europe as The Trouble with Beauty (Heinemann). Other publications include Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990, volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago), The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago), and Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (Yale). Dr. Steiner served as Master of Penn's Modern Languages College House, director of the King's College Program in London, and Chair of Penn's English Department before directing the Penn Humanities Forum.