Stanford University


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  • Vera Geranpayeh

    Vera Geranpayeh

    Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024

    Current 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

    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.

  • Zach Haines

    Zach Haines

    Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2022
    Research Assistant to Professor Kathryn Starkey, German

    BioZachary Haines is a PhD student in Musicology at Stanford University. He is both an active scholar and performer as a baritone, with research interests in the vocal repertoires of the late Renaissance and early Baroque.

  • Stephen Hinton

    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

    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.