School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 21-30 of 47 Results

  • Vera Geranpayeh

    Vera Geranpayeh

    Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
    Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

    Current 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.

  • Fiona Griffiths

    Fiona Griffiths

    Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies and of German Studies

    BioFiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). Griffiths is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life,The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007); she is co-editor (with Kathryn Starkey) of Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) and (with Julie Hotchin) of Partners in Spirit: Men, Women, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, Church History, the Journal of Medieval History, postmedieval, and Viator. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). Griffiths is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

  • Stephen Hinton

    Stephen Hinton

    Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioStephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Music at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in German. His research focuses on aesthetics, the history of music theory, and the music of Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Beethoven.

    He has held several leadership roles at Stanford, including Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute (2011–2015), Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts (2006–2010), and multiple terms as Chair of the Department of Music. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and the Technische Universität Berlin.

    Hinton is the author of Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (winner of the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize), as well as numerous books, articles, and critical editions, including Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera in the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series. His work has appeared in major reference works and handbooks, and he has edited Beethoven Forum as well as volumes in the collected editions of both Weill and Hindemith.

    His recent projects include a revised German edition of his Weill monograph (Kurt Weills Musiktheater: Vom Songspiel zur American Opera, Suhrkamp 2023) and the online edX courses on Haydn and Beethoven for the series Defining the String Quartet, created with the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

  • Nadeem Hussain

    Nadeem Hussain

    Associate Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioI received my B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 1990. I then went to the Department of Philosophy at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I completed a Ph.D. there in 1999. I also spent the academic year of 1998-99 at Universität Bielefeld in Germany. I have been teaching at Stanford since 2000.

  • Christopher Krebs

    Christopher Krebs

    Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioChristopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He was a lecturer at University College (Oxford) and an assistant (2004-09) and then associate professor (2009-12) at the department of the Classics at Harvard, before he joined the Classics department at Stanford. In the spring of 2007 he was the professeur invité at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), in 2008/9 the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (on which see his “You say putator” in the TLS), and, most recently, the recipient of the Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

    His publications include Negotiatio Germaniae. Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and A most dangerous book. Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), which has or will be translated into six languages. He has also co-edited a volume on Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 as well as an intellectual history of the late Roman Republic (with W.W. Norton); he is also co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Caesar. Other long-term projects and interests focus on Posidonius, Sallust and Tacitus, Latin lexicography, Thersites and Prometheus, and Annio di Viterbo.

    He organized and co-chaired a seminar on Classical Traditions at Harvard Humanities Center, where he also co-hosted a conference on “The Reception of Odysseus in Literature, Art, and Music” (April 2009). He co-organized a conference on “The historians’ Plupast” (2006), an APA Panel on “Caesar the ‘Litterator’” (January 2012), and a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist,” at Amherst College (September 2012). He will deliver the third annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies (at Emory University) in the fall of 2013 and the forty-third Skotheim Lecture in History (at Whitman College) in the spring of 2014. In the summer of 2014 he will co-teach in France a seminar on Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute.

    Most recent and forthcoming articles include: “Annum quiete et otio transiit: Tacitus (Agr. 6.3) and Sallust on liberty, tyranny, and human dignity” (A Companion to Tacitus), “M. Manlius Capitolinus: the metaphorical plupast and metahistorical reflections” (The historians’ Plupast), “Caesar, Lucretius and the dates of De Rerum Natura and the Commentarii” (Classical Quarterly), and “Caesar’s Sisenna” (Classical Quarterly).

    In 2012-13 he will offer the following courses: Advanced Latin: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline; Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians (cross-listed in Anthropology); a freshman seminar Eloquence Personified: How to Speak Like Cicero; and a graduate seminar on Sallust and Virgil. In 2013-14 he will offer graduate seminars on The fragmentary Roman Historians and Lucan and the poetics of civil war, advanced Greek: Attic Orators and advanced Latin: Tacitus. He also teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies: a course on Tacitus (Tacitus: Character Assassin, Satirist, and Trenchant Historian) in the winter term, and a course on Lucan (The Dark Genius: Lucan, his civil war epos, and the court of Nero) in the spring.