Vance Byrd is a Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds a secondary appointment in History of Art. He is also Special Advisor in the Office of the Provost. His teaching and research focus on literature in German, visual culture, and print culture since the nineteenth century. His first monograph, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, was published in the New Studies in the Age of Goethe series at Bucknell University Press. He currently is completing his second monograph, Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration, and a co-edited collection titled Queer Print Cultures is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press.

Vance Byrd argues in his current book project, Listening to Panoramas, that commemoration does not only pertain to markers, common soldier monuments, and equestrian statues—the panorama is a commemorative medium. The paintings he examines originally were created by those who experienced the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). These veterans, journalists, and European artists went on the execute the Gettysburg Cyclorama (1883) and the Atlanta Cyclorama (1886). These works have sustained the attention of Americans who sought to grapple with the Civil War since the 1880s, whether veterans groups, Southern mayors, American presidents, or Black painters in the twenty-first century. That these painted works of commemorative art, still on view to this day, influenced so many Americans can be explained in part because the media, art, and performance cultures created for these attractions reached even more Americans than the paintings themselves. While these two paintings seek to present history as a continuous narrative, printed materials and other media forms—typescripts, audio recordings of lectures, soundtracks, television clips, short films, and museum audio guides—document how sight and sound framed panoramas ideologically in the service of sectional and racial reconciliation. He demonstrates in this study that Black artists—Henry Box Brown, Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems—have turned to the panoramic form and its media and performance culture to resist these narratives about defeat and victory in the American Civil War. Black freedom struggle, he concludes, is inseparable from the history of this commemorative medium.

His research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the Classics Foundation Weimar, and the Quadrangle Historical Research Foundation. In 2019, he was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2021–2022, in addition to being a residential fellow at the National Humanities Center, he was part of Duke University’s Humanities Unbounded initiative and a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

He is currently on the editorial boards of Monatshefte, The German Quarterly, and the Signale book series at Cornell University Press. He is on the board of the American Friends of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and the Academic Advisory Committee of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Vance Byrd is special advisor in the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty in 2024–2025. Serving during his second year of an Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellowship, he will work closely with Vice Provost for Faculty Laura W. Perna and executive director of faculty affairs Kristen Barnes to research best practices; enhance faculty leadership and promote equity in hiring, mentorship, and academic policies at Penn; co-develop training materials for leadership programs, such as the Penn Faculty Fellows and Provost’s Leadership Academy; serve on key university committees; and collaborate on special projects.