School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-100 of 231 Results
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James Ferguson
Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsJames's Ferguson's research has focused on southern Africa (especially Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa, and Namibia), and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. These include the politics of “development”, rural-urban migration, changing topgraphies of property and wealth, constructions of space and place, urban culture in mining towns, experiences of modernity, the spatialization of states, the place of “Africa” in a real and imagined world, and the theory and politics of ethnography. Running through much of this work is a concern with how discourses organized around concepts such as “development” and “modernity” intersect the lives of ordinary people.
Professor Ferguson's most recent work has explored the surprising creation and/or expansion (both in southern Africa and across the global South) of social welfare programs targeting the poor, anchored in schemes that directly transfer small amounts of cash to large numbers of low-income people. His work aims to situate these programs within a larger “politics of distribution,” and to show how they are linked to emergent forms of distributive politics in contexts where new masses of “working age” people are supported by means other than wage labor. In such settings of scarce and diminishing employment opportunities, distributive practices and distributive politics are acquiring a new centrality, with social protection, in particular, emerging as a key arena within which fundamental questions are addressed concerning how resources should be distributed, who is entitled to receive them, and why. In this context, new political possibilities and dangers are emerging, even as new analytical and critical strategies are required. A book on this topic (Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution) was recently published by Duke University Press. -
Anne Fernald
Josephine Knotts Knowles Professor of Human Biology, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWorking with English- and Spanish-learning children from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, our research examines the importance of early language experience in supporting language development. We are deeply involved in community-based research in San Jose, designing an innovative parent-engagement program for low-resource Latino families with young children. We are also conducting field studies of beliefs about child development and caregiver-child interaction in rural villages in Senegal. A central goal of this translational research is to help parents understand their vital role in facilitating children’s language and cognitive growth.
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Russell D. Fernald
Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn the course of evolution,two of the strongest selective forces in nature,light and sex, have left their mark on living organisms. I am interested in how the development and function of the nervous system reflects these events. We use the reproductive system to understand how social behavior influences the main system of reproductive action controlled by a collection of cells in the brain containing gonodotropin releasing hormone(GnRH)
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Brian Ferneyhough
The William H. Bonsall Professor in Music, Emeritus
BioStudies with Ton de Leeuw, Amsterdam Conservatory, and Klaus Huber, Basel Conservatory.
Awards: Mendelssohn Scholarship, 1968; Lady Holland Composition Award, Royal Academy of Music, 1967; Grand Prix du Disque, 1978 and 1982; Gaudeamus Music Week Prizes 1969 and 1970; Composition Stipend, City of Basle, 1969-71; Koussevitsky Prize 1978; Composition Stipend of Southwest German Radio, 1974-5; Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, Paris 1984; Associate Royal Academy of Music, 1990; Royal Philharmonic Award for Chamber Music Composition, 1996; Fellow, Birmingham Conservatoire, 1995; Elected Member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1996; Fellow, Royal Academy of Music, 1998; Elected Corresponding Member of the Bayrische Akademie der Schönen Künste 2005.
Activities: member of International Jury ISCM, 1980 (Finland) and 1988 (Hong Kong); member jury Gaudeamus Composition Competition 1983; member of International Reading Panel, IRCAM, 1993 & 1999; member of Kranichsteiner Preis Jury, Darmstadt, 1978-96; member of board, Perspectives of New Music 1995-present.
Compositions featured throughout the world and at all the major European festivals of contemporary music. Compositions include: Fourth String Quartet, Bone Alphabet, Terrain, Allgebrah, Incipits, Unsichtbare Farben, String Trio. His opera Shadowtime was premiered as part of the Munich Biennale 2004, and has been taken to Paris, New York, Bochum and London 2004-5. In 2006, it was staged in Stockholm, Sweden. In October 2006, his orchestral piece Plötzlichkeit was premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival, Germany. His Fifth String Quartet was premiered in Witten and later played in the Aldeburgh and Salzburg Festivals.
Publications: Collected Writings, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998; POETIK, and various articles and interviews. -
Chris Field
Melvin and Joan Lane Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Director, Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor of Earth System Science, of Biology and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and at Woods
On Leave from 01/01/2024 To 06/30/2024Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch
My field is climate-change science, and my research emphasizes human-ecological interactions across many disciplines. Most studies include aspects of ecology, but also aspects of law, sociology, medicine, or engineering. -
Paula Findlen
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.
My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.
Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand. -
Thomas Fingar
Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsChinese domestic and foreign policy, US-China relations, US foreign policy, intelligence analysis, mega-trends and global challenges, geopolitical consequences of climate change
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Jordan Marie Finley
Undergraduate, English
Undergraduate, Theater and Performance StudiesBio2021 Transfer Cohort. Theatre & Performance Studies Major (Acting Concentration). Creative Writing Minor. Stanford Rams Head Theatrical Society. Stanford Cheer 2021. Grammy U San Francisco Chapter.
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Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering
On Partial Leave from 04/01/2024 To 06/30/2024BioChelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and the William George and Ida Mary Hoover Faculty Fellow. Professor Finn's research interests lie in the ability to enable robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. Her work lies at the intersection of machine learning and robotic control, including topics such as end-to-end learning of visual perception and robotic manipulation skills, deep reinforcement learning of general skills from autonomously collected experience, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast learning of new concepts and behaviors. Professor Finn received her Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, an NSF graduate fellowship, a Facebook fellowship, the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across three universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.
Website: https://ai.stanford.edu/~cbfinn -
Morris P. Fiorina
Wendt Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
BioMorris P. Fiorina is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. He received an undergraduate degree from Allegheny College and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and taught at Caltech and Harvard before joining Stanford in 1998. Fiorina has written widely on American politics, with special emphasis on the study of representation, public opinion and elections. He has published numerous articles and written or edited thirteen books, including: Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies; Congress--Keystone of the Washington Establishment; Retrospective Voting in American National Elections; The Personal Vote (coauthored with Bruce Cain and John Ferejohn); Divided Government; Civic Engagement in American Democracy (co-edited with Theda Skocpol), Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope), Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics (with Samuel Abrams), Can We Talk: The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics (co-edited with Dan Shea) and most recently, Unstable Majorities. Fiorina has served on the editorial boards of a dozen journals in Political Science, Political Economy, Law, and Public Policy, and from 1986-1990 served as Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received Career Achievement Awards from the American Political Science Association’s Organized Sections on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, and Political Organizations and Parties.