School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-100 of 1,133 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. -
Noor Amr
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
BioNoor Amr is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She is currently writing her dissertation on the “church asylum” (Kirchenasyl) movement in Germany, paying attention to the relationship between sanctuary, religious difference, borders/migration, sovereignty, and political belonging. Her ethnographic research among churches and monasteries across Germany explores how Kirchenasyl—sanctuary from the state—becomes a means through which rejected asylum-seekers gain legibility as subjects worthy of legal recognition. Her broader theoretical interests include theories in political theology, religion/secularism, sanctuary and hospitality, histories of confinement, and the coloniality of asylum.
Prior to her doctoral work, Noor received a B.A. in Politics from Willamette University and an M.T.S. in Philosophy of Religion from Harvard Divinity School, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. -
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 StudiesBioMarlon 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/ -
Paras Arora
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2021
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSocio-Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology, Ethnography, Care, Cognitive Disability, Autism, Gender, Family, Kinship, Ethics, Occupational Therapy, Neurodiversity, Voice, Intuition, Emotions, Everyday Life, & South Asia
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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.
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Mathew Ayodele
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesBioMathew Ayodele is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. His research interest focuses on the Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of Africa, particularly the religious, gender, and medical history in West Africa. He is primarily interested in interrogating the social history of medicine, medical pluralism, Christian missionaries' interplay, and reproductive health in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Mathew is also interested in women's sports history within the context of gender, religion, and media politics in the late 20th century in Nigeria.
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David Barnstone
Ph.D. Student in Communication, admitted Autumn 2024
BioDavid Barnstone studies the dynamics of media use in families with young children. He is particularly interested in how parents form beliefs about media effects and child development. Prior to Stanford, David worked as a full-time science writer and media relations specialist for several scientific organizations, including the American Physical Society, Society for Neuroscience, and Springer Nature.
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Bethany D. Bass
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2024
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Summer 2026
Research Assistant, GSE Centers and ProgramsBioBethany D. Bass is a PhD student studying Race, Inequality, Language and Education & History of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on the relationship between historically Black schools and Black communities, chronicling Black education in South Dallas, Texas, from the late 1930s to the present. Their work uses Black geographic thought, digital humanities, and oral history to listen to how Black elders and young people create sites of Black livingness (McKittrick 2021, Quashie 2021) and learning inside and outside of formal school settings.
Their scholarship is supported by the EDGE: Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Fellowship and The Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) through the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education. -
Farah Bazzi
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioFarah Bazzi was born in Lebanon and raised in The Netherlands. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Farah’s work attempts to bridge both Mediterranean and Atlantic history by focusing on how objects, people, and imaginations moved between the Ottoman world, Morocco, Iberia, and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, Farah’s research interests include environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. In her dissertation, Farah looks at the expulsion of the moriscos and their presence in the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire from a socio-environmental perspective. In addition to this, Farah is interested the construction of Al-Andalus as an aesthetically appealing, pursuable, and transplantable natural and racialized landscape in Spanish, Arabic, and Ottoman sources.
Currently, Farah is one of the project founders and managers of the ‘Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic’ project sponsored by CESTA, the History Department, and the Division of Languages and Cultures. She is also the graduate coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford and the Graduate Student Counselor (director) on the board of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). -
Rodrigo Bello Carvalho
Ph.D. Student in Biology, admitted Autumn 2023
BioI am a field biologist deeply passionate about wildlife ecology and conservation. My academic and professional journey bridges research, fieldwork, and environmental stewardship across some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems.
My work focuses on understanding the functional role of megafauna (large-bodied vertebrates) in shaping tropical ecosystems through processes such as frugivory, herbivory, and seed dispersal. I am particularly interested in how savanna biodiversity, structure, and functioning respond to the loss of megafauna (defaunation), and how ecological insights can inform restoration and conservation strategies in a rapidly changing world.
I hold a Master’s degree in Biodiversity Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford (2021), and graduated with honors in Biological Sciences (B.Sc., 2017) and Biology Teaching (B.Ed., 2018) from the University of Brasília (UnB). My ecological journey began at UnB’s Ecosystem Ecology Lab (2014–2018) under Prof. Mercedes Bustamante, where I first engaged with savanna ecology in the Cerrado.
Driven by pursuing applied conservation, I worked at the Brasília Zoological Garden Foundation (2018) and taught Science and Biology in Brasília’s private schools (2019), experiences that deepened my belief in connecting ecology and conservation with communities.
At Oxford’s Ecosystems Lab (2020–2021), I studied defaunation and seed dispersal in the Cerrado, working under Dr. Imma Oliveras and Prof. Yadvinder Malhi. I later joined Brazil’s Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) as an environmental analyst and park ranger (2022–2023), where I was based in the Western Brazilian Amazon, engaging in biodiversity monitoring, sustainable management of natural resources, and frontline conservation enforcement of three Conservation Units within the Purus River Basin.
Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Biology at Stanford University in the Dirzo Lab, where my research explores megafauna-ecosystem interactions across Brazilian and African savannas, with a focus on how defaunation reshapes ecosystems. I also collaborate with UNESP’s Bird Ecology Lab on frugivory, seed dispersal, and ecological restoration in the Atlantic Forest. -
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioSinead is an ABD PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and is expecting to complete her dissertation in 2024. Her research investigates ancient Roman sexual culture and where it shows up in the landscape. It focuses on displays of sexuality that do not match up to any social or political identities, including statues of Priapus, emperors portrayed as sexual aggressors and agricultural language adopted as sexual slang.
Sinead comes from Auckland, New Zealand, where she received her M.A. with First Class Honours. Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, she argued that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
Sinead is also interested in the Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow, she is developing an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon. -
Richard E Brown
Ph.D. Student in Political Science, admitted Autumn 2023
BioRick is a political science graduate student who is interested in public policy at the state and local level. He researches the politics of higher education and housing policy. Prior to Stanford, Rick worked for one year as a predoctoral research fellow at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard.
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Alina Bykova
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
BioAlina is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History. Her research interests include Arctic and Soviet environmental history with a focus on energy and industry. Alina is writing her dissertation on the history of energy and extraction on Svalbard, Norway. She also works as a research associate and editor-in-chief at The Arctic Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank.
Alina earned her masters in European and Russian Affairs from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2019. Her masters thesis was about the rise and fall of Soviet mining settlements on Svalbard. Prior to her work in academia, she completed a Bachelor of Journalism at Ryerson University and worked as a breaking news reporter at the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper.
