School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,051-1,100 of 1,231 Results
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Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Master of Fine Arts Student, Art Practice
HIA Grad Mentor, Stanford Arts InstituteBioChukwudubem Ukaigwe is an artist, curator, and writer based out of Canada. Exercising material as an experimental device for cross-examining plural themes, his interdisciplinary practice is an inquiry into semiotic dissonance. Chukwudubem participates in the creation of immersive audiovisual scapes for fecund contemplation, bringing to centre facets of everyday life to generate active conceptual trans-media interconnections pertaining to global aesthetics.
Tapping into a diverse spectrum of influences - from experimental music and literature, to history and futurisms - Ukaigwe approaches his art practice as a double gesture. On one hand, his work is a way of annotating, augmenting, defacing, transposing, and rewriting in the margins of a palimpsestic history. On the other hand, his paintings, installations, and video works are an attempt to assemble and compose a speculative sensorium that permits hearing in a different tempo; one that collapses the subject-object divide and maps out both new and revised sociographies. A compositional practice that is fabulated out of the choice to meander in extant modes of being: fugitive, improvised, ongoing and otherwise.
His social practice is established on the foundations of splintered or shared authorship, community input, fracturing time, and relativity. On obtaining a BFA (Hons.) from the university of Manitoba in Canada, Chukwudubem has presented exhibitions and effectuated artist residencies locally and intercontinentally. Ukaigwe is a founding member of the curatorial force, Patterns collective. -
Calvin Van Zytveld
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioCalvin Van Zytveld is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology who is also pursuing a Doctoral Certificate in Composition. His research focuses on sound recording and music notation. He is working on a dissertation titled 'Fixing Music: the Remediation of Sound and Performance through Notation and Recording 1958-2028,' which explores the means and motivations for fixing and affixing sounds past or future, real or fantastical. It includes chapters on text scores, microphone arrays, dynamic compression, and the pre-history of the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Calvin went blind suddenly and unexpectedly in 2020 due to Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON).
He is the Head Designer for BLIND ENVY, a project based at Stanford’s Center for Computer-based Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to make the first-ever non-visual digital devices for recording and editing audio. BLIND ENVY is a 2026 recipient of the Magic Grant from the Brown Institute.
An avid cellist, he has given solo and chamber music performances in Canada, Sweden, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, and China and played with such musicians and ensembles as Gustavo Dudamel, Robert Spano, Ludovic Morlot, Per Tengstrand, the Richardson Chamber Players, and the English Concert.
His compositions have been performed by Ensemble Mosaik, Plymouth Chamber Players, NEKO3, Distractfold, Peninsula Women’s Chorus, Grand Rapids Choir of Men and Boys, Princeton University Orchestra, and the Princeton Camerata.
He co-directs and performs in two festivals in his hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 2016, Plymouth Chamber Players offers classical chamber concerts free of charge and features members of the Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Grand Rapids symphony orchestras. Across town, 2026 was the inaugural year of Fountain Fest. The festival stretched across four days and included punk rock, rave, stand-up comedy, film screenings, live-coded choir and organ, jazz, free improvisation, and guided meditation.
Calvin graduated summa cum laude in music from Princeton University, where he studied with Steven Mackey and Donnacha Dennehy. He pursued master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, studying composition with Bright Sheng and cello with Richard Aaron.
Recent awards and fellowships include the 2025 Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2026 New Music USA Creator Fund, the RAISE fellowship for community-based research, and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF). -
Dejan Vasic
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Theater and Performance StudiesBioDejan Vasić is an art historian and curator of late modern and contemporary art and moving image media. He specializes in the transnational avant-garde and conceptual art, concentrating primarily on performance, video art, photography, and artists’ films and media works. His research intersects art, power, war, and everyday life, with methodological grounding in historical materialism, memory politics, decolonial, gender and feminist theory, and affirmation of critical thinking as a public good. Dejan is passionate about the history of exhibitions, museology and curatorial practice; he is invested in writings in the first person, and frequently collaborates with artists who battle social, economic and political problems.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Vasić had over a decade of experience in Serbia and the Yugoslav region, where he engaged in radical curatorial practices and critical writing that delves into the politics and ethics of aesthetics. Since 2012, he is a member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA and has served on the Program Advisory Board of AICA-Serbia (2020-2023). Dejan curated visual arts program at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (2017-2023), co-edited the Beton - Cultural Propaganda Kit (2018-2023), was part of the Four Faces of Omarska Working Group (2010-2015), the Culture of Memory curatorial platform (2010-2014) and Kontekst Collective (2009-2013). -
RJ Vasquez
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025
BioRJ Vasquez (he/him) is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on the history of American religions and gives particular attention to spiritual life, migration, labor, and the modern state. He is especially interested in spiritual life as a medium of historical agency.
Raised in California’s Central Valley, RJ earned an associate’s degree at Bakersfield College and a bachelor’s degree at California State University, Bakersfield. He completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard University before beginning his doctoral studies at Stanford.
RJ is also interested in digital humanities and directs a museum and archive revitalization project in his hometown of Wasco, California, where he works to add diversity and accessibility to his community’s shared history. -
Matías Walker
Ph.D. Student in Philosophy, admitted Autumn 2026
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI'm interested in making contributions on both the metaphysical and logical fronts of philosophical questions. My doctoral project will combine tools from modal logic, model theory, higher-order semantics and formal metaphysics, with particular attention to the relationship between logical structure and its semantical reach in metaphysical interpretation.
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Zach Wallis
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioI am a graduate student in the Department of History's doctoral program since 2026. My research focuses on political economy, environment, and energy in Australia, New Zealand, and the Southwest Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have previously undertaken research on Australian and New Zealand intellectual history in the same period, and published an article on James Bonwick's writing about the Aboriginal Tasmanians, titled "History, Extinction, Ambiguity," in the journal History Australia. I hold a first-class honours undergraduate degree in history from McGill University and master’s degrees in history from the Australian National University and the University of Chicago.
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Patrick Walsh
Ph.D. Student in Applied Physics, admitted Autumn 2025
Student Trainer, Stanford Nano Shared FacilitiesBioPatrick graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025 with a B.S. in Applied Math, Engineering, and Physics. He conducted his undergraduate research under Professor Mark Eriksson, where he studied Semiconductor Quantum Dot Qubits. His work focused on developing experimental techniques and numerical tools to automate gate-voltage calibration procedures for quantum dot devices. As an NSF Fellow and graduate student with the Bøttcher group at Stanford, Patrick is interested in using Josephson Junction Arrays to study a variety of problems in condensed matter, including vortex dynamics, quantum phase transitions, and highly correlated materials.
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John Walters
Ph.D. Student in Chemistry, admitted Autumn 2024
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am interested in the attosecond dynamics of atoms and molecules. Specifically, my interest lies in investigating the effect of electron-electron correlation and the influence of non Born-Oppenheimer dynamics on isolated quantum systems to drive understanding of both ground-state and excited-state processes. Additionally, I am interesting in applying covariance and machine-learning based techniques to improve measurement resolution in high-repetition rate experiments.
