School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-8 of 8 Results
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Oluwakemisola Adeusi
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Political Science
Writing Tutor, School of Engineering - Technical Communications ProgramBioKemi’s research interests include transnational, Afro-German, and migrant literature. Her work explores the representations of the inter- and intra-migrant relations in contemporary German migrant literature.
Before joining Stanford's German Department as a Ph.D. student in 2022, she earned a B.A. degree in German from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 2019, and completed her M.A. program in German from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in 2022. She is a 2024/25 student fellow at the Hoover Institution, exploring topics about the migration issue in Germany and the AfD political party. She is also a fellow and mentor of the EDGE fellowship (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education). -
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.
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Bertrand Ngong
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2023
BioMy name is Bertrand C. Ngong. I am originally from Cameroon, a Central African country that still bears the scars of German colonial presence in linguistic, architectural, toponymic, cultural, political, and even memorial aspects to this day. Growing up, this dual African and German heritage became deeply ingrained in me, guiding my steps first toward Germanic studies and then towards African studies. My reflections aim to comprehend how these two legacies interconnect, mutually influence each other, and shape the present-day relations between the German-speaking cultural space and Africa. I am particularly interested in the cultural and intellectual productions of Black people in the German language and/or about Germany. Historically, I investigate the African sources of the historiography of German colonization in Black Africa. Moreover, I closely follow current German-African affairs, especially concerning issues of reparations, restitution of artworks, and repatriation of African remains stolen during German colonization in Black Africa. Lastly, my reflections also seek to challenge and decolonize a certain perception of Germanic studies that would limit this field exclusively to the borders of Germany and Germanic countries.
