Bettina Brandt grew up in Germany, the Netherlands and in French-speaking Belgium. She received MA degrees in French and German from the University of Utrecht and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Brandt taught at MIT, Columbia University and Montclair State University before joining the faculty of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century transnational literature, literatures and theories of the avant-garde(s); the literatures of migration; literary multilingualism and translation studies; German-Jewish literature and the Holocaust; theater and performance studies, including puppets; and early modern global relations.