School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-54 of 54 Results
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Oluwakemisola Adeusi
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Political Science
Student Employee, Hoover InstitutionBioKemi’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). -
R. Lanier Anderson
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.
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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.
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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
Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication
BioShane Denson is 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
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature
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
Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025BioCharlotte 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.
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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. -
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 current research examines female supernatural (übernatürlich) figures in literature transhistorically, spanning medieval to 19th-century German language works, with an emphasis on gender, identity, and spatiality. She engages with haunting, affect, and liminal frameworks to explore how these figures, positioned as the abject, gaze onto patriarchal structures from the periphery, transgress through and with their Otherness, and thus open transformative spaces for reevaluation. Vera amplifies the ancestral female voices in literature, both in terms of authorship and character representation, drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks as well as knowledge traditions rooted in diverse global perspectives and systems of thought that exist beyond Eurocentric and patriarchal paradigms. Her work interrogates the ways in which these marginalized figures challenge dominant systems of power and knowledge.
During her Master’s studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Vera examined the poetry and activism of May Ayim through a framework of hauntology, analyzing how Ayim’s work critiques racial and gender inequalities in post-reunification Germany from an Afro-German perspective while creating space for intersectional solidarity. Vera’s dedication to fostering educational equity and inclusive perspectives within institutionalized learning environments was deeply influenced by her experiences growing up as a first-generation German. During her Bachelor’s studies in English Philology and North American Studies at Georg-August-University Göttingen, she was first inspired by Critical Theory and began to appreciate the profound capacity of literary criticism and the humanities to challenge systems of power and spark social change. -
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.
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Stephen Hinton
Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
BioSpecial fields: aesthetics, history of theory, music of Weill, Hindemith and Beethoven.
Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts. He recently served as chairman of the Department of Music (2022-24), having previously served in that position from 1997-2004 and in 2000-21. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik; Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks; the critical editions of Die Dreigroschenoper (with Edward Harsh) and Happy End (with Elmar Juchem) for the Kurt Weill Edition; Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works.
He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. Recent articles include “Beauty” (with Nick Zangwill) for The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2020); “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle” for The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow (2023); and “Weill's Cinematic Imagination” for The Works of Kurt Weill: Transformations and Reconfigurations in 20th-Century Music (2023). His monograph Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (UC Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater, has been published in a revised German edition as Kurt Weills Musiktheater: Vom Songspiel zur American Opera (Suhrkamp, 2023). Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of edX online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019). -
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.
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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. -
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.
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Bryan Nelson Norton
Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsNorton's first book, Planetary Idealism: The Technics of Nature in German Romanticism, is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. Planetary Idealism investigates how a set of poets and philosophers begin addressing the shifting relations between humans, technical media, and nature in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and start of the nineteenth. During this time, writers such as Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Hegel turn to natural history, poetic experimentation, and Kant’s interrogation of a “technic of nature” in an effort to develop alternatives mode of inhabiting the planet at the outset of the Anthropocene.
His second project, Salt, explores the vital role of an everyday mineral in the making of modernity. The book uncovers the diverse and surprising ways in which salt has come to form contemporary ideas about nature, culture, and even politics around the globe. Currently under review, the book explores the mineral’s centrality to a number of formats and contexts, from lithium extraction and salt tourism in Bolivia to the rise to fame of celebrity chef Nusret Gökçem, aka “Salt Bae.” Drawing particular attention to the mineral basis of digital media and infrastructure, Salt raises vital questions about how modern life has been composed, consumed, and is even dissolved.
Norton is also co-editing a volume of essays on the late philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler. -
Gabriella Safran
Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioGabriella Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.
Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is now working on two monograph projects: one on how people in the Russian Empire listened across social lines, recorded and imitated others’ voices in various media, and reflected on listening and vocal imitation, from the 1830s to the 1880s, and the other on the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.
For more information about her activities and publications, see https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/gabriella-safran -
Matthew Smith
Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies
BioMatthew Wilson Smith’s interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
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Kathryn Starkey
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of English, of History and of Comparative Literature
BioKathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of English, History, and Comparative Literature. Her work focuses primarily on medieval German literature from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and her research topics encompass visuality and materiality, object/thing studies, manuscript illustration and transmission, language, performativity, and poetics. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Palermo (2011) and Freiburg im Breisgau (2013 and 2018).
Recent book publications (since 2012) include:
* Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 800-1600, edited with Jutta Eming (Berlin/New York, 2021).
* Animals in Text and Textile. Storytelling in the Medieval World, edited with Evelin Wetter. Riggisberger Berichte, Vol. 24 (Riggisberg, Switzerland, 2019).
* Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited with Fiona Griffiths (Berlin/New York, 2018).
* Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegger Manuscript, edited and translated with Edith Wenzel, TEAMS series in bilingual medieval German texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016).
* A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s “Welscher Gast” (Notre Dame, 2013).
* Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan, edited with Jutta Eming and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame, 2012).
Professor Starkey is the PI for the Global Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/) for which she received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2018) as well as awards from the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies at Stanford (2016, 2017, 2018).
Her current research projects include a co-authored (with Fiona Griffiths) textbook for the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220).
Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -
Elaine Treharne
Roberta Bowman Denning Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025BioI’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the history of writing systems. I’m currently completing new research on Neil Ripley Ker, his Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, and his methods as a manuscript scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012). Also recently published is the two part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.
I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). Other projects include “Digital Ker”—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s. I am also PI of CyberText Technologies (https://digitalker.stanford.edu); on a project investigating the complex subject of personal archives—SOPES; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include a regular Collegium: the first, on “Distortion” was published as Textual Distortion in 2017; the fourth was published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age in 2020. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0 https://em1060.stanford.edu/). With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies; and with Thomas Mullaney and Kathryn Starkey, I co-direct SILICON (https://silicon.stanford.edu/).
In 2024-2025, I’m delighted to be a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, developing archival tools and guidelines. I’m also the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI). I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. -
Jamele Christa Watkins
Postdoctoral Scholar, German Studies
BioJamele Watkins researches and teaches on issues of race and gender in contemporary German performance, film, and literature (broadly speaking). She is currently working on a book project that focuses on Black internationalism and the solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis in the GDR. She completed her doctoral studies in German at UMass Amherst with the completion of dissertation, “The Drama of Race.” She has also studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
