William Germano
William Germano received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. He has taught at Cooper Union since 2006 and was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences from 2006 until 2017. Prior to that he as the editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press and then vice-president and publishing director at Routledge. His scholarly work considers literature and the allied arts, the material culture of the book, and the problems of intellectual production. He is particularly interested in the writing life of scholars, a subject he has written on in Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press), which has been translated into Japanese, and From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press), which has been published in Spanish and Chinese. He has also written on Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film "The Tales of Hoffmann" in the British Film Institute Film Classics series. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Minnesota review, Scholarly Publishing, SPAN, Publishing Research Quarterly, PNR, Lingua Franca, and other publications. His scholarly essays have appeared in Opera Quarterly, University of Toronto Quarterly, The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Two Conversations with Contemporary Critics, and The Humanities and Public Life. He is a contributor to the two-volume Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare and the Oxford Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy.
A trustee emeritus of The English Institute, he serves on the advisory council of the Princeton University department of English, the boards of Johns Hopkins University Press and of Goldsmiths Press (UK), and the board of the Chicago Manual of Style. His most recent book, Eye Chart (Bloomsbury, 2017), a volume in the Object Lessons series, considers the history of one of the most familiar of graphic designs -- the common eye chart -- and examines its cultural life from the seventeenth century to the present day. Currently, he is working on a book on revising academic writing, to be published by the University of Chicago Press, and a project tentatively called Shakespeare at the Opera: A History of Impossible Projects, which will consider the ways in which Shakespeare's very English plays and characters have been adapted into a very Continental dramatic form.
