The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Assistant Professor of German
Javier Samper Vendrell (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of German and a core faculty member in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. His research examines LGBTQ+ literature and history in Germany since 1890, with particular attention to film, television, photography, and print culture. His teaching and scholarship engage broadly with German and European cultural history, literature, race, gender, sexuality, youth, and popular culture. His current work centers on two areas: the cultural history of the “queer bogeyman” and queer coming-of-age literature and media.
His first book, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic(University of Toronto Press, 2020), contributes to growing interdisciplinary scholarship on non-normative sexualities, the history of homophobia, and the relationship between mass culture and politics. The book investigates the widespread belief in Weimar Germany that homosexuals posed a threat as “seducers of youth” and analyzes how activists within the homosexual emancipation movement challenged this pervasive trope. It has been reviewed in The Point, H-German, H-Soz-Kult, Central European History, German History, Art History, Monatshefte, Norma: International Journal of Masculinity Studies, Mosse Program, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. He also discusses the book on the New Books Network.
Samper Vendrell is the co-editor, with Vance Byrd, of Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community(University of Toronto Press, 2026), an interdisciplinary volume that brings together scholarship in book history, visual and popular culture, pedagogy, and queer studies to challenge conventional narratives of print and material culture.
He is currently finishing his second book, Fear of the Bogeyman: Children, Sexuality, and Monsters in German Culture, which traces the recurring figure of the “queer bogeyman” across German literature, film, television, and digital media from the early twentieth century to the present. The project shows how this cultural monster has served as a site for negotiating anxieties about sexuality, morality, and social order, particularly through depictions of childhood innocence and vulnerability. Through case studies ranging from crime fiction to far-right rhetoric, the book reveals how this figure continues to shape contemporary debates about gender and queerness in Germany.