Nicholas Vazsonyi is Dean of the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University, Jesse Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of German and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Lukács Reads Goethe (1997) and Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge, 2010) as well as editor of Wagner's Meistersinger (2003) and The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013).