School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,051-1,060 of 1,448 Results
-
Judith Richardson
Senior Lecturer in English
BioJudith Richardson is a senior lecturer in English and associate director for the American Studies Program. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judith began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities. The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.
-
John Rick
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus
BioJohn Rick’s research focuses on prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers and initial hierarchical societies, stone tool analysis and digital methodologies, Latin America, Southwestern U.S. Rick’s major research efforts have included long-term projects studying early hunting societies of the high altitude puna grasslands of central Peru, and currently he directs a major research project at the monumental World Heritage site of Chavín de Huántar aimed at exploring the foundations of authority in the central Andes. Other field projects include work on early agricultural villages in the American Southwest, and a recently-initiated project on the Preclassic and Early Classic archaeology of the Guatemalan highlands near Panajachel, Atitlan. Current emphasis is on employing dimensional analytical digital techniques to the study of landscape and architecture, and on exploring the contexts and motivations for the development of sociopolitical inequalities.
-
John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Cecilia Ridgeway
Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am interested in the role that social hierarchies in everyday social relations play in the larger processes of stratification and inequality in a society. My research focuses on interpersonal status hierarchies, which are hierarchies of esteem and influence, and the significance of these hierarchies for inequalities based on gender, race, and social class.
-
Jessica Riskin
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioJessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at MIT before coming to Stanford, and has also taught at Iowa State University and at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation.
Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society. -
Douglas Rivers
Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
BioDouglas Rivers is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University. He is the president and CEO of YouGov/Polimetrix.
-
Donald Roberts
Thomas More Storke Professor, Emeritus
BioDonald Roberts received his A.B. from Columbia University (1961) and his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1963). He earned his Ph.D. in communication at Stanford in 1968, then became a member of the department faculty, serving as Director of the Institute for Communication Research from 1985-1990 and from 1999-2001. He chaired the department from 1990-1996.
Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on communication theory and research and on children, youth, and media. His primary area of research concerns how children and adolescents use and respond to media, a topic on which he has written extensively (e.g., chapters in The Handbook of Communication, Learning from Television: Psychological and Education Research, The International Encyclopedia of Communications, The Handbook of Children and the Media,and The Handbook of Adolescent Psychology).
He has also written comprehensive reviews of the literature on the effects of mass communication for the Annual Review of Psychology and for the revised edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology, and co-authored a chapter on public opinion processes in the Handbook of Communication Science.
Roberts helped to design a parental advisory system to label violence, sex/nudity, and language for the computer software industry which has been adapted by the Internet Content Rating Association for use on the World Wide Web. He has spoken on the issue of content labeling and advisories internationally (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Australia, South Africa), and has published several articles dealing with content labeling.
He has consulted with a number of companies involved in producing children’s media (e.g., Filmation, ABC-Disney, MGM Animation, Sunbow Entertainment, Nelvana Ltd., and KidsWB!), and currently functions as Educational Director for DIC Entertainment, helping to develop content to meet the FCC’s requirements for educational programming for children. Roberts also served on the board of advisors of MediaScope, a nonprofit organization founded to promote constructive depictions of social issues in film, television, music, and video games, and was a planner and panelist for Vice President Al Gore’s Conference on Families and Media.
Roberts is co-editor of The Process and Effects of Mass Communication and co-author of Television and Human Behavior, It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: Popular Music in the Lives of Adolescents and Kids on Media in America: Patterns of Use at the Millennium.
