Kathryn Starkey
Pigott Hall 107
650 724 3622
starkey@stanford.edu
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Professor of German Studies and, by courtesy, of English
Director, Department of German Studies
Kathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtest, Professor of English. Her primary research interests are medieval and early modern Germanic literature and culture with an emphasis on visuality, material culture, language, performativity, and the history of the book.
Professor Starkey is the author of Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Willehalm” (2004), and A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin's "Welscher Gast" (2013). She also co-authored (with Edith Wenzel) and edition, translation, and commentary of songs by the medieval poet Neidhart (ca. 1210-1240) entitled Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript (2016). Professor Starkey also co-edited (with Horst Wenzel) Imagination und Deixis: Studien zur Wahrnehmung im Mittelalter (2007), and Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (2005). Together with Ann Marie Rasmussen and Jutta Eming, she conducted a three-year research project funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation TransCoop Program on “Tristan and Isolde and Cultures of Emotion in the Middle Ages.” This project culminated in the co-edited volume Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan (2012).
Her current projects include a book on "Textile Poetics" that explores the medieval fascination with textiles. This project examine textiles in literature as metaphor, conceptual paradigm for artistic production, and material object. It reveals that literary textiles, like actual textiles, were understood as powerful tools of cultural, political, intellectual, and economic production and exchange. Professor Starkey is also the PI on the Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS), an online compendium of original medieval texts and their translations in an accessible, user-friendly, open-source format. This project, which is currently in development, will also provide commentaries on the texts, and links to online manuscripts and other relevant materials to enable scholars to use the site for research and teaching.
Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ph.D., German Literature and Culture, University of California, Berkeley, 1998
MA., Germanic Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
BA Honours, German, Linguistics, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, 1990
