After earning Masters degrees from the Université de Paris/Sorbonne and the University of Delaware, Professor Wendelin Guentner was awarded her doctorate degree at the University of Chicago in 1982. She taught at Marquette University before coming to The University of Iowa in 1985.

Areas of graduate teaching expertise included: 19th-century French literature and culture, especially Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism; the novel, non-fictional prose (the travel narrative, the preface, the salon, the letter); aesthetics and interarts discourse; the relationships between literature and the plastic arts, technology and cultural expression.

She has written two books, Stendhal et son lecteur: Essai sur les "Promenades dans Rome" (Gunter Narr, 1989) and Esquisses littéraires: Rhétorique du spontané et récit de voyage au XIXe siècle (Nizet, 1997).

She is also the author of numerous book chapters, articles and encyclopedia entries which have appeared in scholarly publications in the United States and abroad. They include: Romantisme, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Romanic Review, Stendhal Club, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, Cambridge History of French Literature, Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate, Art Journal, French Literary Studies, Romanische Forschungen, Les Amis de Flaubert, L'Information littéraire, Australian Journal of French Studies, Neophilologus, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Contemporary French Civilization, Romanistiche Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, H.B., Revue internationale d'études stendhaliennes and the Bulletin de la Société Chateaubriand. These studies focus on the history and rhetoric of the travel narrative, interpretative strategies and reader reception, photography and book illustration, the discourse of the preface and of salon criticism, the literary fragment and the pictorial sketch in literary and aesthetic discourse. Chateaubriand, Delacroix, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Jules Michelet, George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, EugèneFromentin, the Goncourt Brothers, Hippolyte Taine, Claude Vignon are among the authors discussed.

Professor Guentner has published in the area of women art critics in 19th-century France, and is currently editing a collection of essays by art historians and literary critics entitled Vanishing Acts: Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France.  She is completing a book, The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse in France, which examines the pictorial sketch in theoretical, critical and literary discourse.  Her next book project, which deals with technological change at the beginning of the last century, is entitled Remembrance of Things Present:  Jules Claretie’s Historical Imagination in La Vie à Paris (1880-1913).

Professor Guentner has given papers at numerous universities and colloquia in North America and Europe. She serves on the advisory board of Nineteenth-Century French Studies.