Joseph Peter Maria Stern, FBA (25 December 1920 – 18 November 1991) was an authority on German literature. Born into a Jewish family, he was educated in Prague, Vienna and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his MA in 1947. During the war he served in the Czechoslovakian army in exile. He took up a lectureship at Bedford College, London, and then at Cambridge in 1952, returning to St. John's. He married Sheila McMullan (23 June 1922 – 16 November 2005) in 1944, having met her as a student in 1940.