Dr. Javier Samper Vendrell

Biography

Javier Samper Vendrell is an Assistant Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on LGBTQ+ literature and cultural history in Germany from 1890, with a particular emphasis on film, television, and print culture. He engages broadly with German and European cultural history, literature, race, gender, and sexuality, and explores popular culture. His book, 'The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic' (University of Toronto Press, 2020), contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on non-normative sexualities and the history of homophobia, analyzing how activists from the homosexual emancipation movement challenged the pervasive belief that homosexuals posed a threat to youth in Weimar Germany. Additionally, he co-edited the forthcoming volume 'Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, Community' (University of Toronto Press, 2026), which brings together various fields of scholarship to challenge traditional narratives in print culture. His current research involves the cultural representation of the 'queer bogeyman' in German literature and media and the implications of such depictions on societal anxieties regarding sexuality and morality.

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