School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-10 of 240 Results
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Oluwakemisola Adeusi
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Political ScienceBioOluwakemisola "Kemi" (pronouns: she/her) received her B.A. in German from the University of Ibadan in 2011. She completed her M.A. in German at The University of Alabama in 2022 and is now a doctoral candidate in German studies at Stanford.
Her dissertation, “Representations of Inter- and Intra-Migrant Interactions in Contemporary German Literature,” examines how German-language texts represent complex relationships among migrant communities, moving beyond simplistic binaries of “host” and “immigrant” identity. -
Hongmin Ahn
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2026
BioHongmin Ahn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he studies modern Korean and Japanese religions. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he connects religion, history, and anthropology by examining how the memories of colonization, war, and national division have shaped the lives of Korean religious communities, both in Korea and in diaspora (most prominently Japan).
Unified by an underlying focus on the body — one living, one dead — his research interests stretch across two seemingly disparate areas. The first turns to the living body in its most kinetic, yet monotonous, devotional form: prostration. He examines the emergence of prostration as a popular practice — often performed in sets of 108, 1,080, and 3,000 — in modern South Korea, asking how this bodily devotion rose to prominence as a means of coping with contemporary challenges that lay members face. Focused on sensorial, emotional, and spatial experience, he looks at how lay practitioners construct selfhood and subjectivity through this repetitive corporeal movement.
The second turns to the dead body: the remains of Koreans who died in Japan during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Unfolding the layered historical traumas left by the Japanese Empire, he explores the contested belonging of these bodies (both physical and spiritual) between the unwelcoming hostland and the divided homeland. He examines three types of posthumous care extended to them: ethnic care by fellow Korean religious communities, civic care by Japanese faith communities, and lastly, what he terms "violent care" by nationalistic Shinto institutions, most prominently Yasukuni Shrine.
Before Stanford, Hongmin was an IAFOR Global Fellow at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), The University of Osaka, and completed a year of Japanese-language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. He holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions from Bard College. -
Marlon Ariyasinghe
Ph.D. Student in Theater and Performance Studies, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Grad Writing Tutor, Hume CenterBioMarlon Ariyasinghe (he/him) is a writer, editor, theatre practitioner and researcher from Sri Lanka. He is a master’s graduate in English from the University of Geneva and received his BA (honors) in English from the University of Peradeniya. He was the co-editor of Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts (VIII, Issue 2), a special edition on Sri Lankan Combative Art, Angampora. He was the Senior Assistant Editor at Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture. He served as the secretary of the Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has organized multiple international literary conferences from 2010-2023.
His rapportage has been featured in Reuters, DW, BBC World, WION, The Washington Post, NPR, and other outlets worldwide. Marlon has directed plays for Emmet Theatre Company in Geneva and published a collection of poetry Froteztology in 2011. Marlon’s research interests include Southasian theatre and historiography, performing blackness, Southasian antiblackness, cognition and performance, theatre pedagogy, and decolonizing actor-training methodologies. His research has been published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research International, Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts, and Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth.
Selected directing credits include: Exorcism (2025), Twelfth Night (2019), The Clean House (2015), Antigonick (2014), and Rizana (2013).
He tweets at @MarlonAriy
https://marlonariyasinghe.com/ -
Mariam Atallah
Master of Fine Arts Student, Documentary Film and Video
BioMariam Atallah is a photographer and filmmaker rooted in Cairo, Egypt, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in filmmaking and first discovered her creative spark through the city’s lively streets. Her work examines connections and tensions between Egypt and the United States, exploring how political, social, and personal systems intersect across both contexts. She has been a Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow at Kartemquin Films, and her films have screened at the Toronto Arab Film Festival and the Egyptian American Film Festival.
