School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 11-20 of 112 Results

  • Nora Elizabeth Barakat

    Nora Elizabeth Barakat

    Assistant Professor of History

    BioI am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. My research focuses on people, commodities and landscapes in the interior regions between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have a particular interest in how legal categories of population, property and economy shaped and were shaped by the everyday experiences of social life. I am also committed to bringing both the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East into discussions of world history, especially narratives about capitalism and modern state formation. I teach courses on modern Middle East history, capital and crisis, Islamic law, and environmental history.

    My current book project, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Nomads and Property in the Ottoman Empire, examines the ways tent-dwelling inhabitants of the Syrian interior contributed to and contested attempts to transform the desert fringe into a grain-exporting breadbasket in the second half of the nineteenth century. The project locates the experience of the Ottoman Syrian interior in a global context of commercial and administrative expansion into landscapes deemed underproductive, examining similarities and divergences with the American West and the Russian steppe. Using court and land registers, I uncover the stories of specific tent-dwelling individuals and communities involved in struggles over property, commerce, and the forms of modern governance. My other ongoing project combines my interests in the histories of Islamic law and capitalism. It explores the twentieth-century legacies of late Ottoman economy-making efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, particularly the codification of civil law. My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Center for American and Overseas Research Centers.

    Before coming to Stanford, I completed my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and taught in the Persian Gulf for five years, first at Qatar University and then at New York University Abu Dhabi. At NYU Abu Dhabi, I co-founded OpenGulf, a set of interconnected digital projects focusing on historical documentation about the Gulf region.

  • Khalil Barhoum

    Khalil Barhoum

    Senior Lecturer in the Language Center

    BioKhalil Barhoum is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics. He holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Jordan. He came to the U.S. on a Rotary International scholarship, which helped him earn a Masters' degree in English Literature from Georgia Southern in 1977; he received a second Masters and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1985. His teaching experience includes the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Georgetown University, and the Johns Hopkins' School of International Studies (SAIS). Upon obtaining his Ph.D from Georgetown University, he joined Stanford University where he taught Arabic in the Department of Linguistics. Currently, he is coordinator of Stanford's Program of African and Middle Eastern Languages in the Language Center. He is an ACTFL-certified OPI and WPT Tester/Rater in Arabic and has served on the board of the Association of Arabic Teachers in America (AATA). He is a former national president of the Association of Arab American University Graduates(AAUG) and has served twice as the president of its California Chapter. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Cheryl Rubenberg and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in 2010. In addition to teaching Arabic courses at all various levels, Dr. Barhoum has designed and taught several language and culture courses, including Arabic Calligraphy; Media Arabic; Colloquial Arabic; Arab Women Writers and Issues; The West through Arab Eyes; The Arab World through Travel Literature; and The Arab World and Culture through Literature. Dr. Barhoum has lectured on Arabic and Arabic literature, Arabic calligraphy, and the Arab world at several college campuses, including Princeton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UMASS Amherst, among others.

  • Christopher O. Barnes

    Christopher O. Barnes

    Assistant Professor of Biology and, by courtesy, of Structural Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch in our lab is aimed at defining the structural correlates of broad and potent antibody-mediated neutralization of viruses. We combine biophysical and structural methods (e.g., cryo-EM), protein engineering, and in vivo approaches to understand how enveloped viruses infect host cells and elicit antigen-specific immune responses. We are particularly interested in the co-evolution of HIV-1 and broadly-neutralizing IgG antibodies (bNAbs), which may hold the key to the development of an effective HIV-1 vaccine. In addition, we are investigating antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 and related zoonotic coronaviruses (CoV), with the related goal of developing broadly-protective immunotherapies and vaccines against variants of concern and emerging CoV threats.

    HIV-1; SARS-CoV-2; coronaviruses; cryo-EM; crystallography; vaccines; directed evolution

  • Donald Barr

    Donald Barr

    Professor (Teaching) of Pediatrics (General Pediatrics), Emeritus

    BioDonald Barr is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Stanford School of Medicine, and Professor by Courtesy in the Graduate School of Education. He teaches in the Undergraduate Program in Human Biology, where he helped to found Human Biology's curriculum in health policy. His research has studied the effect of the organizational structure of the U.S. medical care delivery system on the quality of primary care. He has also studied cultural and linguistic barriers to health care access for low-income patients, and factors associated with higher rates of attrition from pre-medical studies among minority students at Stanford and other universities. The fourth edition of his book, Introduction to U.S. Health Policy: The Organization, Financing, and Delivery of Health Care in America, was published in 2016. The third edition of his book, Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity and the Social Determinants of Health, was published in 2019. In June 2003 Dr. Barr was awarded the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contribution to Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. In 2006 he received the Miriam Aaron Roland Prize, which recognizes Stanford faculty who engage and involve students in integrating academic scholarship with significant and meaningful volunteer service to society.