School of Humanities and Sciences
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Vera Geranpayeh
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsVera Geranpayeh is a PhD candidate in German Studies. Her dissertation investigates how gender drives narrative in medieval German literature, engaging (feminist) narratology, structuralist approaches, and theories of minor characters. She examines how minor female figures catalyze narrative movement by disrupting the course of patriarchal progression, and how these structural dynamics reverberate across periods into modern literature. Her work develops a narratological framework that highlights their epistemic authority, grounded in Otherness, marked by exclusion from minne.
In addition, she pursues a project on the 1593 Hohenlohe cookbook, focusing on domestic authorship, female custodianship of knowledge, and the cultural transmission of culinary practices in early modern German aristocratic households.
She is co-initiator of SCRIPTA, an interdisciplinary research group on gender, knowledge, and agency in premodern manuscript cultures that combines theoretical discussion with hands-on archival work in Stanford’s Special Collections and hosts workshops with guest scholars from other institutions.
Her broader research spans queer survival, female bonds, and desire in nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle German literature. She is the recipient of the Clayman Institute’s 2025 Marilyn Yalom Research Prize.
