Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture.
Simone Stirner is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her first book, Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press in the series Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics (ed. Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy). The book develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between reading poetry and the affective experience of grief by studying how poems in the enduring aftermath of National Socialism and the Holocaust make space for an encounter with the uncontainable dimensions of loss—on and off the page. She has also published articles on the poetry of Paul Celan, on Walter Benjamin’s theory of reading, and on queer memory in New Literary History, Monatshefte, The Germanic Review, and Colloquia Germanica (forthcoming) as well as several edited volumes. Her essays and creative non-fiction appear in Qui Parle, Feminist German Studies, and Platform. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Max Kade Foundation, the DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, and the Hellen Diller Foundation.