Stanford University
Showing 41-50 of 56 Results
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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.
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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).
