School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • John Rick

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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.

  • Eric Roberts

    Eric Roberts

    The Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus

    BioFrom 1990-2002, Roberts served as associate chair and director of undergraduate studies for the Computer Science Department before being appointed as Senior Associate Dean in the School of Engineering and later moving on to become Faculty Director for Interdisciplinary Science Education in the office of the VPUE.

  • Regina Lee Roberts

    Regina Lee Roberts

    Head of Social Science Resource Group, Librarian, Social Sciences Resource Group

    Current Role at StanfordHead of the Social Sciences Resource Group & Librarian for Anthropology, Communication & Journalism, Feminist Studies, & Lusophone Africa.

  • Steven O. Roberts

    Steven O. Roberts

    Associate Professor of Psychology

    BioI am interested in the psychological bases of racism, and how to dismantle them.

  • Lesley Robertson

    Lesley Robertson

    Artist in Residence in Music

    BioAfter celebrating 34 years with the internationally celebrated St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ), Lesley Robertson (viola) continues to make her life at Stanford University where along with her St Lawrence colleagues she directs the chamber music at the Department of Music. Ms. Robertson teaches viola, coaches chamber music, and also spearheads the Emerging String Quartet Program at Stanford and the annual St Lawrence Chamber Music Seminar. A graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, Ms. Robertson also holds a degree from the University of British Columbia where she studied with her mentor, Gerald Stanick. A founding member of the SLSQ, Ms. Robertson toured regularly with the ensemble, performing 100+ concerts worldwide per season (in Berlin, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Toronto, among others) while also nurturing close ties to the Stanford community performing in various classes, dormitories, laboratories, hospitals, and in Stanford's glorious Bing Concert Hall. She participated in the Marlboro Festival for several years and and toured with Musicians from Marlboro before co-founding the SLSQ. She has served on the jury of several international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition and the Concours de Genève. Summer music festivals include Spoleto Festival USA, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Banff Festival, Festival of the Sound, Santa Fe Chamber Music, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Bravo Vail, Music@Menlo and more. Robertson plays on a viola (1992) made by fellow Canadian John Newton and a bow (2016) by Francois Malo.

  • Aileen Robinson

    Aileen Robinson

    Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAileen K. Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century British theatre and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.

    Robinson's current book manuscript explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century science museums. She investigates how theatrical performances and magic shows drew upon technological innovations and formed unique methods for disseminating scientific knowledge. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production.

  • Jonathan Rodden

    Jonathan Rodden

    Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

    BioJonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford who works on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and three books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. One of those books, "Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism," was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He works with institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID, and the European Parliament on issues related to fiscal decentralization and federalism.

    He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He has written a series of papers applying tools from mathematics and computer science to questions about redistricting, culminating in a 2019 book called "Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide" (Basic Books). Rodden has also embarked on an inter-disciplinary collaborative project focused on handgun acquisition.

    Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Other Affiliation:
    Director of the Spatial Social Science Lab at Stanford

  • Jesse Rodin

    Jesse Rodin

    Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts

    BioJesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the distant past. Immersing himself in original sources, he sings from choirbooks, memorizes melodies and their texts, and recreates performances held at weddings, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts. A passionate teacher, Rodin has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses at institutions such as Princeton University, the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France).

    Rodin’s recent monograph "The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin" (Cambridge University Press, 2024) presents a theory of how fifteenth-century polyphonic music happens in time. Other published works include a volume in honor of Joshua Rifkin (2024), "The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music" (2015), a volume for the "New Josquin Edition" (2014), "Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel" (Oxford University Press, 2012), and articles that bring historiographical, analytical, evidentiary, practical, and embodied perspectives to a range of subjects. An in-progress co-edited book aims to clear the ground and offer a new path forward in Josquin studies.

    As director of the vocal ensemble Cut Circle Rodin performs internationally. In partnership with the Belgian label Musique en Wallonie, Cut Circle recently embarked on a project to record the complete music of Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450/51–1521). The first album appeared in 2023; the second, titled "JOSQUIN: II. Motets milanais ; Missa L’ami Baudichon," is forthcoming in fall 2025. Other albums include a disc of anonymous fifteenth-century masses (2021) as well as double albums devoted to the complete songs of Johannes Okeghem (2020), the late masses of Guillaume Du Fay (2016), and music from the Sistine Chapel (2012). A short film titled "Sounds of Renaissance Florence" (2021) recaptures the soundscape of fifteenth-century Italy.

    Two projects in the digital humanities strive to make the period as a whole more accessible. Rodin directs the "Josquin Research Project" (josquin.stanford.edu), a digital tool for exploring a large musical corpus. He co-directs "Mapping the Musical Renaissance," which facilitates basic understanding as well as serendipitous discovery.

    Rodin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and the American Musicological Society. He has been featured in a variety of public forums, including The New Yorker. He prepares new editions of all the music Cut Circle performs; these are freely available through the Josquin Research Project. For his work with Cut Circle he has received the Prix Olivier Messiaen, the Noah Greenberg Award, Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), and a Diapason d’Or. Cut Circle’s latest album was a finalist for a Gramophone Award.

    At Stanford Rodin directs the Facsimile Singers, in which students develop native fluency in old musical notation. He has organized symposia on the composer Johannes Okeghem, medieval music pedagogy, musical analysis in the digital age, and regional Italian cooking.

  • Thomas Rogerson

    Thomas Rogerson

    Basic Life Research Scientist

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAs a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Mark Schnitzer I am utilizing chronic, in vivo, fluorescence calcium-imaging combined with chemo and optogenetic manipulations to determine the mechanisms by which neuronal circuits and the ensembles of cells within them enable the encoding and recall of context-dependent memories.

  • Joseph Romano

    Joseph Romano

    Professor of Statistics and of Economics
    On Partial Leave from 01/01/2025 To 06/30/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWork in progress is described under "Projects"

  • Jonathan Rosa

    Jonathan Rosa

    Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature
    On Partial Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop frameworks for understanding ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first examines racial reckonings across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.

  • Noah Rosenberg

    Noah Rosenberg

    Stanford Professor of Population Genetics and Society

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman evolutionary genetics, mathematical models in evolution and genetics, mathematical phylogenetics, statistical and computational genetics, theoretical population genetics

  • Michael Rosenfeld

    Michael Rosenfeld

    Professor of Sociology

    BioI am a social demographer who studies race, ethnicity, and family structure, the family's effect on children, and the history of the family. I am interested in mate selection as a social as well as a personal process.

  • Janice Ross

    Janice Ross

    Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emerita

    BioJanice Ross, Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and former faculty director of ITALIC, Stanford's residence based Freshman arts immersion program, has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and Ph.D degrees from Stanford. Her research interests and books focus on the intersections of social issues and their expression through performance. They include, Like A Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale Univ. Press 2015), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press 2007),winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007), Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin Press 2001/ University of Florida Press, Second Edition/2020) and, co-edited with Susan Manning and Rebecca Schneider, The Futures of Dance Studies, (University of Michigan Press (2020). Her research interests concern performance and social justice with a particular focus on tensions between political and aesthetic expression. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross Cultural Perspective, (Routledge, 2017),The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2019) Soloists and The Modern Dance Canon (Univ. Press of Florida, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the 2016 CORD Award for Outstanding Contributions to Dance Research , an NYU Fellowship for the Center for Ballet and the Arts (2018) and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (Italy 2022). Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars.

  • Gregory Rosston

    Gregory Rosston

    Gordon Cain Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

    BioGreg Rosston is Director of the Public Policy program at Stanford University, the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy). He teaches Economics and Public Policy courses on competition policy and strategy, economic policy analysis, and writing and rhetoric.

    Dr. Rosston served as Deputy Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission working on the implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the design and implementation of the first ever spectrum auctions in the United States. In 2011, he was Senior Economist for Transactions for the Federal Communications Commission for the proposed AT&T – T-Mobile transaction. He served as a member and co-chair of the Department of Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee.

    Dr. Rosston received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and his A.B. with Honors from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Rosston has written extensively on the application of economics to telecommunications and competition issues. He has advised companies and governments regarding auctions and served as a consultant to various organizations including the World Bank and the Federal Communications Commission, and as a board member and advisor to high technology, financial, and startup companies. He serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the Stanford Federal Credit Union, as a Board member of the Nepal Youth Foundation and as an Advisory Board member of Sustainable Conservation and the Technology Policy Institute.

  • Grant M. Rotskoff

    Grant M. Rotskoff

    Assistant Professor of Chemistry

    BioGrant Rotskoff studies the nonequilibrium dynamics of living matter with a particular focus on self-organization from the molecular to the cellular scale. His work involves developing theoretical and computational tools that can probe and predict the properties of physical systems driven away from equilibrium. Recently, he has focused on characterizing and designing physically accurate machine learning techniques for biophysical modeling. Prior to his current position, Grant was a James S. McDonnell Fellow working at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in the Biophysics graduate group supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His thesis, which was advised by Phillip Geissler and Gavin Crooks, developed theoretical tools for understanding nonequilibrium control of the small, fluctuating systems, such as those encountered in molecular biophysics. He also worked on coarsegrained models of the hydrophobic effect and self-assembly. Grant received an S.B. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, where he became interested in biophysics as an undergraduate while working on free energy methods for large-scale molecular dynamics simulations.

    Research Summary

    My research focuses on theoretical and computational approaches to "mesoscale" biophysics. Many of the cellular phenomena that we consider the hallmarks of living systems occur at the scale of hundreds or thousands of proteins. Processes like the self-assembly of organelle-sized structures, the dynamics of cell division, and the transduction of signals from the environment to the machinery of the cell are not macroscopic phenomena—they are the result of a fluctuating, nonequilibrium dynamics. Experimentally probing mesoscale systems remains extremely difficult, though it is continuing to benefit from advances in cryo-electron microscopy and super-resolution imaging, among many other techniques. Predictive and explanatory models that resolve the essential physics at these intermediate scales have the power to both aid and enrich the understanding we are presently deriving from these experimental developments.

    Major parts of my research include:

    1. Dynamics of mesoscale biophysical assembly and response.— Biophysical processes involve chemical gradients and time-dependent external signals. These inherently nonequilibrium stimuli drive supermolecular organization within the cell. We develop models of active assembly processes and protein-membrane interactions as a foundation for the broad goal of characterizing the properties of nonequilibrium biomaterials.

    2. Machine learning and dimensionality reduction for physical models.— Machine learning techniques are rapidly becoming a central statistical tool in all domains of scientific research. We apply machine learning techniques to sampling problems that arise in computational chemistry and develop approaches for systematically coarse-graining physical models. Recently, we have also been exploring reinforcement learning in the context of nonequilibrium control problems.

    3. Methods for nonequilibrium simulation, optimization, and control.— We lack well-established theoretical frameworks for describing nonequilibrium states, even seemingly simple situations in which there are chemical or thermal gradients. Additionally, there are limited tools for predicting the response of nonequilibrium systems to external perturbations, even when the perturbations are small. Both of these problems pose key technical challenges for a theory of active biomaterials. We work on optimal control, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, and simulation methodology, with a particular interest in developing techniques for importance sampling configurations from nonequilibrium ensembles.

  • Scott Rozelle

    Scott Rozelle

    Helen C. Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThemes related to China, especially agricultural policy, the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions, and the economics of poverty and inequality.

  • Jorge Ruffinelli-Altesor

    Jorge Ruffinelli-Altesor

    Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Emeritus

    BioProfessor Jorge Ruffinelli (Uruguay), a disciple of Angel Rama at the University of Uruguay, followed him as Director of the literary section of the seminal Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1968. In 1973 he was Adjunct Professor of the Latin American literature program (directed by Noé Jitrik) at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1974 he emigrated to México, where he was appointed Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias at the Universidad Veracruzana, a position he held for for twelve years. At the Universidad Veracruzana he was also Professor in the school of Letters, and collaborated in all the major cultural journals and newspapers of the Latin American continent. In 1986 he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary journal Texto crítico for twelve years. A member of various international editorial boards, in the United States he has directed the journal Nuevo texto crítico since 1987.

    He has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism and more than five hundred articles, critical notes and reviews in journals throughout the world. A recognized authority on Onetti, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Latin American literary history, during the nineties his critical work has centered on Latin American cinema. In 1993 he filmed a documentary on Augusto Monterroso for which he interviewed major Mexican writers and critics. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles on feature films from and about Latin America. His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968, a project that analyzes the work, marketing, and reception of over more than fifty authors (Ana Solari, Milagros Socorro, Karla Suarez, Mayra Santos, David Toscana, Rodrigo Fresan, Juan Forn, Martin Kohan, Jorge Vopli, among others). His teaching centers on the intersection of the interests above and cultural politics.

  • Nancy Ruttenburg

    Nancy Ruttenburg

    William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures

    BioNancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.

    Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.

    Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.

  • Chiara Sabatti

    Chiara Sabatti

    Professor of Biomedical Data Science and of Statistics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStatistical models and reasoning are key to our understanding of the genetic basis of human traits. Modern high-throughput technology presents us with new opportunities and challenges. We develop statistical approaches for high dimensional data in the attempt of improving our understanding of the molecular basis of health related traits.

  • Gabriella Safran

    Gabriella Safran

    Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioGabriella Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.

    Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is now working on two monograph projects: one on how people in the Russian Empire listened across social lines, recorded and imitated others’ voices in various media, and reflected on listening and vocal imitation, from the 1830s to the 1880s, and the other on the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.

    For more information about her activities and publications, see https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/gabriella-safran

  • Scott D. Sagan

    Scott D. Sagan

    Caroline S. G. Munro Memorial Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
    On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsJust War doctrine and the development of norms concerning the use of force; public attitudes in the U.S., U.K., France, and Israel about the use of nuclear weapons and non-combatant casualties; organizations and management of insider threats; the management of hazardous technology; security of nuclear materials, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

  • Mehran Sahami

    Mehran Sahami

    Tencent Chair of the of the Computer Science Department, James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    BioMehran Sahami is Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department and the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering. As a Professor (Teaching) in the Computer Science department, he is also a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education and previously served as the Associate Chair for Education in Computer Science. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Google. His research interests include computer science education, artificial intelligence, and ethics. He served as co-chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula 2013, which created curricular guidelines for college programs in Computer Science at an international level. He has also served as chair of the ACM Education Board, an elected member of the ACM Council, and was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to the state's Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Advisory Panel.

  • Jose Saldivar

    Jose Saldivar

    Leon Sloss, Jr. Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

    BioJosé David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.

    He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012),coeditor (with Monica Hanna and Jennifer Harford Vargas) of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016) coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).

    Additionally, he has published numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Studies, American Literary History, The Americas Review, Revista Casa de las Américas, Daedalus, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Global South. He has served on the editorial boards of Duke University Press, the University of California Press, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals American Literary History, The Global South, Aztlan, and World Knowledges Otherwise. He has received personal research grants from The Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the William Rice Kimball Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (invitation for a future visit).

    His teaching is divided evenly between graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and some of his undergraduate courses are cross-listed in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

    In 2003, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Western Literature Association; in 2005, he received the Chicano Scholar of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association; in 2007 he received the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the University of California, Berkeley; and in 2016, he was the winner of the American Literature Society’s highest honor, the Jay B. Hubbell Medal. The medal is sponsored by the American Literature Society, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, and is awarded annually to one “scholar whose lifetime of scholarly work has significantly advanced the study of American literature.” . Before coming to Stanford in January 2010, Saldívar was the Class of 1942 Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.