Office:听 McKenna 229
Lauren Shizuko Stone (she/her) is Assistant Professor of German. She received her PhD from New York University.听Her work focuses on narratives of marginal figures in everyday life and is animated by an interest in how such literary representations intersect with a range of philosophical domains. She teaches German, Austrian, and Swiss literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and brings stories of ordinary life into conversation with literary theory, history of philosophy, and queer and critical theories.听
Her first monograph,听The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life听(In Press, Fordham University Press, May 2025) argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect philosophically on the temporality of experience and thereby offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future. She has published articles on depictions of children and kinship in nineteenth-century German and Austrian literature. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the volume听Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics this Side of Seduction.听(Fordham: 2015). She is currently at work on her next monograph,听Feeling Queer: Affect and Ambivalence in the Long Century of Desire,听which charts shifting poetic strategies depicting queer women and their desires from the prose and poetry from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and makes the case that women鈥檚 queer sexuality and its disapprobation are reflected in the poetics of ambivalence.
She is the German program鈥檚 Graduate Associate Chair,听the Director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Critical Theory, and an affiliate faculty member in the LGBTQ Studies Program.
Recent courses:
Gothic, Horror, and Fantasy
Invention of Sexuality
Utopia and Queer Poetics
Foundations of Critical Theory
The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School
Selected publications:
The Small Worlds of Childhood: Philosophy, Poetics, and the Queer Temporalities of Early Life. (In Press, Fordham University Press, Spring 2025)
Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics this Side of Seduction.听(Fordham University Press: 2015) Introduction and Co-Editor (with Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz and Barbara Natalie Nagel).
鈥淩ilke鈥檚 Kinderstube. Phenomenology in Childhood Spaces鈥� in The German Quarterly 90, no. 4 (2017): 476-491听
鈥淏eilage zum Brief: On 鈥楨pistolarity鈥� and Materiality in Bettine von Arnim鈥檚 Die G眉nderode鈥� in Colloquia Germanica 47, no. 3 (2017): 287-305
听鈥淎pproximate Family: The Taxonomy of Motherhood in Theodor Storm鈥檚 Viola Tricolor鈥� in The Germanic Review 92, no. 1 (2017): 1-16听听