Petra Dierkes-Thrun

Lecturer in Comparative Literature

Focal Groups:
Humanities Education
Philosophy and Literature

Contact:

Building 260, Room 232
Phone (650) 725-8646
pdthrun@stanford.edu

Office Hours:

By appointment

BIO:

Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s research and teaching interests include the European and transatlantic fin de siècle and modernism (including literature, the visual arts, opera, dance, and film); feminist and queer theory; LGBTQ literary and cultural studies; and literary theory. Her book, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression, was published by The University of Michigan Press in Spring 2011. Other publications include articles on Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Stéphane Mallarmé, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Strauss, Victoria Cross, fin-de-siècle realism, and feminism and modernist dance. Petra Dierkes-Thrun is an Editorial Board member of Rodopi's "Dialogue" series. She also co-edits The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies , a peer-reviewed, international scholarly online journal dedicated to the figure of the New Woman in fin de siècle and modernist society and culture, published by The Rivendale Press (UK) and affiliated with The Oscholars.

EDUCATION:

2003: Ph.D. in Cultural and Critical Studies. English Department, University of Pittsburgh.
1995 and 1996: Erstes Staatsexamen in English, Theology, and German. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, Germany.

AFFINITY LINKS:

modernism
literary theory
Fin de siècle
European modernism
Transatlantic modernism
queer theory
feminist theory

News & Events

Teagle Foundation grant awarded to Russell Berman for the project, “Graduate Student and Faculty Collaborative Teaching in the Humanities”

May 3, 2012

The DLCL is pleased to announce that Russell Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities,...

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: "How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (Literature)"

Oct 26, 2011

Oct 17, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on:"How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (...

Courses

COMPLIT

110/310

Introduction to Comparative Queer Literary Studies

Win

2012-13

Introduction to the comparative literary study of important gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender writers and their changing social, political, and cultural contexts from the 1890s to today: Wilde, Gide, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Radclyffe Hall, E.M. Forster, Thomas Mann, Georges Bataille, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters, Audre Lorde, discussed in the context of 20th-century feminist and queer literary and social theories of gender and sexuality (Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Julia Serano, and others).
COMPLIT

112/312

Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents

Aut

2012-13

Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde's Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.
COMPLIT

133/333

Gender and Modernism

Spr

2012-13

Gender and sexuality in trans-Atlantic modernist literature and culture from the 1880s-1930s. Topics include the 19th-century culture wars and the figures of the dandy and the New Woman; modernist critiques of Enlightenment rationality; impact of World War I on gender roles; gender and the rise of modern consumer culture, fashion, design; the modernist metropolis and gender/sexuality; the avant-garde and gender; literary first-wave feminism; homoerotic modernism; modernism in the context of current theories of gender and sexuality.