In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values.
Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania, past Chair of the Penn English Department, and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum (now, the Wolf Humanities Center). Her most recent books are The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom (2024); The Real RealThing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010); Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001); and The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (listed in the “NY Times 100 Best Books of 1996”).
Steiner’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, and she is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, and Royal Society of Canada. Steiner’s six opera libretti have been composed by Paul Richards, Frances White, and Mark Rimple. The latest, using both her text and her photography, premiered in New York in 2024, Upon Reflection: An Opera in Ten Images, starring soprano Sherezade Panthaki and the musicians of Parthenia. Steiner has presented multimedia installations in the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennales.
Heather Love, a Professor in Penn’s English Department, is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project ("To Be Real,”) concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing.
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Cosponsored by Kelly Writers House and the Department of English