Stanford Humanities Center
Irene Kuo is a PhD candidate in German Studies at Stanford University. She studied comparative literature with a focus on German and Spanish at Georgetown University. She specializes in 21st century German literature, representations of refugees and migrants at the intersection of law and literature, and humanitarian discourse in life writing.
SHC Project
Credible Witness: Seeking Authenticity in Narrative Representations of Asylum
Kuo’s dissertation examines contemporary German literary texts on forced migration published in the wake of prominent geopolitical events such as the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, the Syrian Civil War, and the 2015 European “refugee crisis.” She considers the weight of testimonial evidence in the legal legitimation of asylum claims by investigating the relationship between concepts of autobiographical authenticity in life writing research and the framework for credibility assessment in the Common European Asylum System. By drawing on narratology, asylum law, and autobiography studies, her dissertation demonstrates how literary narratives about flight interrogate the culture of suspicion surrounding asylum-seeker accounts in asylum-granting institutions and political discourse about refugees.
