William Germano received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. He studies and writes on intellectual production, the material culture of the book, and literature and the allied arts. 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, 2nd ed. 2008) and From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He has published in PMLA, minnesota review, Scholarly Publishing, SPAN, Publishing Research Quarterly, PNR and other publications, and writes frequently for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

For over twenty years he directed programs in scholarly publishing, first as editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press and then as vice-president and publishing director at Routledge; during his publishing career he developed wide experience with disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences, working with many extraordinary scholars, among them Peter Galison, Jacques Derrida, Cornel West, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gilles Deleuze, bell hooks, Herbert Gans, Stephen Orgel, Michael Taussig, Dario Fo, Sander Gilman, Stephen Greenblatt, Arthur Danto, Raymond Williams, Paul Willis, Stanley Aronowitz, David Bordwell, Julia Kristeva, Wayne Koestenbaum, James Elkins, Marjorie Garber, Peter Stallybrass, Fredric Jameson, Diana Fuss, and Martin Jay.

He has taught in the graduate program in publishing at NYU, is a frequent speaker at academic conferences, and has given workshops and seminars on professional scholarly writing across North America and in Europe and New Zealand.

His current research interests include the processes by which scholars generate scholarship, the history of book indexes and the organization of knowledge in the Early Modern period, and the aesthetic and cultural work of opera. He is beginning work on a book entitled What Opera Knows that will explore the kinds of knowledge embodied in operatic expression as well as preparing new editions of his books on writing.