Kathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies. Her primary research interests are medieval and early modern German literature and culture with an emphasis on visuality, material culture, language, performativity, and the history of the book.

She is the author of Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Willehalm” (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), and A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin's "Welscher Gast" (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 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. Professor Starkey also co-edited (with Horst Wenzel) Imagination und Deixis: Studien zur Wahrnehmung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2007), and Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Press, 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 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

Prof. 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.