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, who currently teaches in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Pennsylvania State University, is both a scholar and a translator. She has written many articles on experimental forms of multilingualism in contemporary literature, especially about Yoko Tawada . She is also the translator of De Berghollander (2010), the first prose collection of Tawada in Dutch translation.