School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 961-970 of 1,448 Results

  • Michael Penn

    Michael Penn

    Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics

    BioMichael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies, is a specialist in the history of early Christianity with a particular focus on middle eastern Christians who wrote in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac.

    Professor Penn’s first book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning.

    Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration that uses recent advances in the computerized analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of Syriac Christianity and the manuscripts they produced.

    Before joining Stanford, Professor Penn was on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has additional experience as a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. Professor Penn has also held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA.

    Ph.D. (Religion) Duke University (1999)
    A.B. (Molecular Biology) Princeton University (1993)

  • Bissera Pentcheva

    Bissera Pentcheva

    Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics

    BioBissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics, phenomenology, and acoustics. Her most recent book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press 2017) explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. She has also edited, Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics and Ritual (Ashgate, 2017). Pentcheva has published another two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships among them: J. S Guggenheim, American Academy of Rome, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of Classical Arabic, Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Onassis Foundation (Greece), Dumbarton Oaks, and Columbia University's Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship. Her work has been published at the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Convivium.

  • Blas L. Pérez Henríquez

    Blas L. Pérez Henríquez

    Senior Research Scholar

    BioBlas L. Pérez Henríquez founded and serves as Director of the California-Global Energy, Water & Infrastructure Innovation Initiative at Stanford University, sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West, where he is a Senior Research Scholar focusing on regional low-carbon development opportunities. His research and teaching centers on policy analysis to advance clean innovation through novel technological, business, policy, and social solutions for a new clean economy and a net zero, carbon neutral future. He directs the Local Governance Summer Institute @ Stanford (LGSI) and its international version the Smart City: Policy, Strategy and Innovation Institute @ Stanford. He also leads the Stanford | Mexico Clean Economy 2050 program.

    He has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Engineering and Sciences of the Technological Institute of Superior Studies of Monterrey (ITESM) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London, United Kingdom, and as Guest Professor at the Centre of Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City, Mexico.

    He is the author of “Environmental Commodities and Emissions Trading: Towards a Low Carbon Future,” Resources for the Future – RFF Press/Routledge, Washington, DC (2013) and co-editor of “Carbon Governance, Climate Change and Business Transformation,” Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research, Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford, UK (2015). He also co-edited the book "High-Speed Rail and Sustainability, Decision-making and the political economy of investment," Routlege Explorations in Environmental Studies, Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford, UK (2017). He has written on public-private environmental and energy collaboration in Silicon Valley, water-energy nexus, sustainable transportation and on the use of information technology to support environmental markets and smart policymaking.His most recent publication is the chapter on Environmental Public Policy in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2025) and has been a contributiing author to reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations (UN).

    Pérez Henríquez is a member of the Distinguished Advisory Group of the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets (IC-VCM), derived from the work of the UN Carney Taskforce for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM) where he served as Member of the Board of Advisors. He was a member of the Mexico – United States Entrepreneurship & Innovation Council (MUSEIC), created through the High-Level Economic Dialogue between the presidents of the United States and Mexico. He served as the U.S. Co-chair of the MUSEIC Energy & Sustainability Subcommittee. Pérez Henríquez is also on the International Advisory Board of Public Administration & Policy: An Asia-Pacific Journal. From 2002 to 2015, he directed UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy which he had founded, and was a faculty member of the Goldman School of Public Policy. He has served as an ex-officio member of the Goldman School advisory board (2002 -2012), and as a Quarterly Chair of the Commonwealth Club of California, the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum.

    Pérez Henríquez holds a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from UC Berkeley, a law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a diploma in Public Policy from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), and a certificate in Compared Environmental US – EU Law & Policy from Indiana University, Leiden & Rotterdam Universities.

  • C. Ryan Perkins

    C. Ryan Perkins

    Curator for South Asian Studies and Islamic Studies, Humanities Resource Group

    Current Role at StanfordAs the Curator for South Asian and Islamic Studies I am responsible for building the library's collection of materials from and about South Asia and the Islamic world in English, European languages, and languages of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. This involves building and sustaining a network of antiquarian dealers, book vendors, scholars, publishers, and libraries in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Apart from responding to faculty teaching needs I work in collaboration with the South Asia Center, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and their affiliates to provide research assistance to faculty, students, and other library users. I also oversee the Bahai collection.

  • Petra Persson

    Petra Persson

    Associate Professor of Economics, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Health Policy

    BioPetra Persson is Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University, where she also serves as the Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar in the School of Humanities and Sciences and holds a courtesy appointment as Associate Professor of Health Policy. She is a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

    Professor Persson earned her PhD in Economics from Columbia University in 2013, her MSc in Economics from Stockholm School of Economics in 2006, and her BA in Political Science and Mathematics from Stockholm University in 2005. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (2013-2014) and a Dissertation Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program (2012-2013).

    Persson's research lies at the intersection of family economics, health economics, and public finance, spanning topics including health disparities, maternal and child well-being, family structure and behavior, fertility policy, and social insurance design. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and has published articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review: Insights, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and British Medical Journal.