Gilad Shiram
My dissertation, To Sing Beyond Mankind: Reimagining the Human in Twentieth-Century Jewish Poetry across German, Polish, and Hebrew, brings into dialogue the poetry of Paul Celan, Zuzanna Ginczanka, and Zelda Schneurson. Reading across different languages, I examine how poetic form responds to historical catastrophes by reshaping our understanding of the human condition and humanity's position in the world in relation to nonhuman elements. This project grows out of my earlier work on Celan's poetics, particularly my master's thesis exploring Celan's concept of the Atemwende (Breathturn), and extends that inquiry into a broader comparative and cross-linguistic frame while engaging new theoretical frameworks. My dissertation committee consists of Amir Eshel (chair), Lea Pao, Vered Karti Shemtov, and Gabriella Safran. In addition to my work in German Studies, I am a graduate affiliate of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and I co-direct Stanford's Hebrew Workshop.
My teaching at Stanford has focused on both language instruction and literature. Most recently, I served as a teaching assistant for Professor Lea Pao's course Ten Poems That Will Change Your Life. I previously co-taught the seminar Rainer Maria Rilke: Poetry and the Meaning of Life with Professor Amir Eshel. I have also served as instructor for four quarters of the first-year German sequence, teaching quarters 1 and 2 online and quarters 2 and 3 in person. Additionally, I have tutored Hebrew to graduate students in the History and Education departments to support their research.
Alongside my academic research, I write and translate poetry. My debut collection, Precision Mechanics, is forthcoming in Hebrew with Pardes Publishing in 2026. Poems from the collection have appeared in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing. Additional poems, in English translations prepared in collaboration with Dr. Eric Kim, will appear in the next issue of Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation. I have also translated poetry from German and Polish into Hebrew. My translations of Barbara Köhler are forthcoming in a coming issue of Nanopoetica: Journal for Short Literature devoted to contemporary German poetry, earlier translations of Köhler were published in HO! – A Literary Magazine, and my translation of Zuzanna Ginczanka appeared in HaMusach – Online Literary Journal.