Simone Stirner

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of German and Comparative Literature working on poetry and poetics, memory studies, and the intersections of critical and creative practices. 

My 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.

A new project focuses on the aesthetic forms and practices of queer memory in post-war Germany; another charts the relation between modernist poetics and craft practices (weaving, pottery, woodcuts, screen prints).

Articles on the poetry of Paul Celan, on Walter Benjamin’s theory of reading, and on queer memory are published in New Literary History, Monatshefte, The Germanic Review, and Colloquia Germanica (forthcoming) as well as several edited volumes. Essays and creative non-fiction appear in Qui Parle, Feminist German Studies, and Platform.

Prior to joining Harvard, I was an Assistant Professor of German at Vanderbilt University and a Faculty Fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I received a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2020 working on German, Hebrew, and French literatures, with Designated Emphases in Jewish Studies and Critical Theory. 

My work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Max Kade Foundation, the DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, and the Hellen Diller Foundation. I teach courses on a range of topics from contemporary poetry to critical theory to monuments and urban art. I am interested in experimenting with the stylistic registers of academic writing and regularly offer courses that incorporate practices of creative writing as modes of analysis. If you are a student in any department and curious about any aspect of my work, I invite you to get in touch.