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 student in German Studies at Stanford University. Her research examines representations of female subjectivity and Otherness in German literature from the Middle Ages to the present. She analyzes figures whose gendered, epistemic, and embodied difference obstructs narrative progression and resists containment. Drawing on affect theory, queer theory, and feminist narratology she theorizes these characters as excessive—marked by a surplus of knowledge, bodily presence, or moral force that strains and reshapes the text’s architecture. Her work explores how gender operates not only thematically but structurally, driving plot, obstructing closure, and exposing the limits of narrative control. These figures appear as threats to the coherence of patriarchal order, revealing how gendered Otherness can destabilize the very frameworks meant to contain it. She advances feminist literary scholarship by developing a transhistorical framework for understanding how gendered figures of excess persist across genres and periods—not as elements resolved by narrative, but as forms that retain the power to intervene, refract meaning, and haunt narrative itself.
