School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 23 Results

  • R. Lanier Anderson

    R. Lanier Anderson

    Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioR. Lanier Anderson (Professor of Philosophy, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities) works in the history of late modern philosophy and has focused primarily on Kant and his influence on nineteenth century philosophy. He is the author of The Poverty of Conceptual Truth (OUP, 2015) and many articles on Kant, Nietzsche, and the neo-Kantian movement. Some papers include “It Adds Up After All: Kant’s Philosophy of Arithmetic in Light of the Traditional Logic” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2004), “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption” (European Journal of Philosophy, 2005), “What is a Nietzschean Self?” in Janaway and Robertson, eds., Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity (OUP, 2011), and “‘What is the Meaning of our Cheerfulness?’: Philosophy as a Way of Life in Nietzsche and Montaigne” (European Journal of Philosophy, 2018). Current research interests include Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Nietzsche’s moral psychology, Montaigne, and special topics concerning existentialism and the relations between philosophy and literature (see, e.g., “Is Clarissa Dalloway Special?” Philosophy and Literature, 2017). He has been at Stanford since 1996, and has also taught at Harvard, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Penn. With Joshua Landy (Comparative Literature, French), he has been instrumental in Stanford’s Philosophy and Literature Initiative. He currently serves Stanford as Senior Associate Dean for Humanities and Arts.

  • Russell Berman

    Russell Berman

    Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

    BioProfessor Berman joined the Stanford faculty in 1979. He was awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin, and in 1997 the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has directed several National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers, and he is now a member of the National Humanities Council. At Stanford, he has served in several administrative offices, including Chair of German Studies, Director of the Overseas Studies Program, and Director of Stanford Introductory Studies. In 2011 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. Professor Berman is the editor emeritus of the quarterly journal Telos. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department. He is currently the Faculty Director of Comparative Literature at Stanford and Director of the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World at the Hoover Institution.

  • Elizabeth Bernhardt-Kamil

    Elizabeth Bernhardt-Kamil

    Professor of German Studies

    BioElizabeth B. Bernhardt (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is the John Roberts Hale Director of the Language Center and Professor of German Studies at Stanford University. She has spoken and written on second-language reading, teacher education, and policy and planning for foreign- and second-language programs. At the 2014 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Dr. Bernhardt was presented with the 2014 Distinguished Service to the Profession Award, from the Association of Departments of Foriegn Languages (ADFL). Her book, Reading Development in a Second Language (1991), earned her the MLA’s Mildenburger prize as well as the Edward Fry Award from the National Reading Conference as an outstanding contribution to literacy research. Understanding Advanced Second Language Reading, (2011) appeared with Routledge. UNESCO has recently published her pamphlet on teaching second-languages and her work has appeared in the Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education; Debating Issues in American Education; and in the International Encyclopedia of Education. She has published in the Modern Language Journal, Applied Linguistics, the ADFL Bulletin, Foreign Language Annals, and Reading Research Quarterly. In 2014 she received the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession and in 2015 was elected Honorary Member, American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). In 2018 she received the Wilga Rivers Award for Leadership in Foreign Language Education (Postsecondary). In 2022, Conducting Second-Language Reading Research: A Methodological Guide appeared with Routledge.

  • Adrian Daub

    Adrian Daub

    J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioMy research focuses on the long nineteenth century, in particular questions of gender in literature, music and philosophy. My first book, "Zwillingshafte Gebärden": Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), traces four-hand piano playing as both a cultural practice and a motif in literature, art and philosophy (an English edition of the book recently appeared as Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)). My second book Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explored German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche. Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013), deals with eroticism in German opera after Wagner. My most recent academic book, The Dynastic Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2020) traces the fate of the dynasty in the age of the nuclear family. A comparative and intermedial study of the ballad-form in nineteenth century Europe will appear in 2022 with Oxford University Press. In addition, I have published articles on topics such as fin-de-siècle German opera, women composers in the 19th century, the history of feminist philosophy, the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, film music, literature and scandal, the legacies of Richard Wagner, the cultural use of ballads in the nineteenth century, and writers like Novalis, Stefan George, Walter Benjamin, Sophie Mereau, Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald. I also write on popular culture and politics: in this capacity I co-wrote The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (with Charles Kronengold) and published a German-language essay collection Pop Up Nation (Hanser, 2016). My book What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) has been translated into five languages. I write articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Die Zeit (Germany), The Guardian (UK), The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads and the LA Review of Books. More information can be found on my personal website adriandaub.com.

    I am the Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities. I have previously directed the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) and the Department of German Studies.

  • Shane Denson

    Shane Denson

    Associate Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication

    BioShane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of three books: Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). He is also co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016).

    See also shanedenson.com for more info.

  • Amir Eshel

    Amir Eshel

    Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature
    On Leave from 09/01/2023 To 08/31/2024

    BioAmir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

    Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

    Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

    Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

    Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

  • Charlotte Fonrobert

    Charlotte Fonrobert

    Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
    On Leave from 09/01/2023 To 08/31/2024

    BioCharlotte Elisheva Fonrobert specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to GrecoRoman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender(2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.

  • Marisa Galvez

    Marisa Galvez

    Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioMarisa Galvez specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. At Stanford, she currently teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance French literature and love lyric, as well as interdisciplinary upper level courses on the medieval imaginary in modern literature, film, and art.

    Her first book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2012, awarded John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America), treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category, “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. The first comparative study of songbooks, the book concerns three vernacular traditions—Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian—and analyzes how the songbook emerged from its original performance context of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and finally became a literary object that performs the interests of poets and readers.

    Her second book, The Subject of Crusade:Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines how the crusader subject of vernacular literature sought to reconcile secular ideals about love and chivalry with crusade. This study places this literature in dialogue with new ideas about penance and confession that emerged from the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth. Subject argues that poetic articulations are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon, and examines another version of speaking crusades, in which lyric, romance and materials such as tapestries, textiles, and tombstones manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals.