Simone Stirner

Assistant Professor of German Studies
Max Kade Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Contemporary German Studies

My research focuses on poetry and poetics, memory studies, and the intersection of critical and creative practices.

My book manuscript, Grief Readings: Poetry, Form, and the Present of Holocaust Remembrance encounters the unravelling, non-linear dimensions of grief in the formal effects of poetry and reveals their transformative potential in the present of reading. From the work of Paul Celan to Irena Klepfisz and Charlotte Delbo to Max Czollek, poetry makes space for grief and in doing so offers a vision for cultures of remembrance that center ongoingness, vulnerability, and solidarities 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 literary modernism and craft practices (weaving, pottery, woodcuts, screen prints).

I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2020 (German, Hebrew, and French). Before that, I completed a B.A. and M.A. (also in Comparative Literature) at LMU Munich and was a fellow in the creative writing program Manuscriptum: Münchner Kurse für literarisches Schreiben.

Recently taught courses include: Poems for All; Pop and Protest; Memory and Monuments; Contemporary German Fiction; Great German Works.