School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 25 Results

  • Marisa Galvez

    Marisa Galvez

    Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioMarisa Galvez specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. At Stanford, she currently teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance French literature and love lyric, as well as interdisciplinary upper level courses on the medieval imaginary in modern literature, film, and art.

    Her first book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2012, awarded John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America), treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category, “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. The first comparative study of songbooks, the book concerns three vernacular traditions—Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian—and analyzes how the songbook emerged from its original performance context of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and finally became a literary object that performs the interests of poets and readers.

    Her second book, The Subject of Crusade:Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines how the crusader subject of vernacular literature sought to reconcile secular ideals about love and chivalry with crusade. This study places this literature in dialogue with new ideas about penance and confession that emerged from the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth. Subject argues that poetic articulations are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon, and examines another version of speaking crusades, in which lyric, romance and materials such as tapestries, textiles, and tombstones manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals.

  • Hester Gelber

    Hester Gelber

    Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of German Studies, Emerita

    BioHester Gelber specializes in late medieval religious thought. She has taught courses on philosophy of religion as well as medieval Christianity. She has written extensively on medieval Dominicans, including: Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God by Robert Holcot OP and most recently It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford 1300-1350. She has now retired.

    Professor Gelber received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 and has taught at Stanford since 1978, beginning as a part-time lecturer in Philosophy before moving to Religious Studies in 1982.

  • Albert Gelpi

    Albert Gelpi

    Coe Professor of American Literature, Emeritus

    BioFULL NAME: Albert Joseph Gelpi

    ACADEMIC ADDRESS: Department of English
    Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305

    HOME ADDRESS: 870 Tolman Drive, Stanford CA 94305

    BIRTH: July 19, 1931, New Orleans, Louisiana

    FAMILY: Married Barbara Charlesworth, June 14 1965
    Children: Christopher, born 1966; Adrienne, born 1970

    EDUCATION: A. B. Loyola University (New Orleans, 1951
    M. A. Tulane University, 1956
    Ph. D. Harvard University, 1962

    ACADEMIC POSITIONS:
    Assistant Professor, Harvard University, 1962-68
    Head Tutor, Department of English, Harvard University, 1965-68
    Associate Professor, Stanford University, 1968-74
    Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, Stanford, 1969-72, 1978-80
    Professor, Stanford University, 1974-1999
    William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, 1978-1999
    Guggenheim Fellow, 1977-78
    Vice Chair, Department of English, Stanford University, 1979-81, 1988-97
    Chair, American Studies, Stanford University, 1976-77, 1989-90, 1994-97
    Associate Dean of Graduate Studies & Research, Stanford University, 1980-85
    Chair, Department of English, 1985-88
    William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, emeritus, 1999—

    PUBLISHED BOOKS:
    Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, Harvard University Press, 1965, paperback W. W. Norton, 1971

    The Poet in America, 1650 to the Present, D. C. Heath, 9173

    Adrienne Rich’s Poetry (edited with Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi), W. W. Norton, 1973

    The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet, Harvard University Press, 1975; reissued with new introduction Cambridge University Press, 1991

    Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, Cambridge University Press, 1986

    A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910-1950, Cambridge University Press, 1987

    Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (edited with Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, W. W. Norton, 1992

    Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, University of Michigan Press, 1993

    The Blood of the Poet: Selected Poems of William Everson, Broken Moon Press, 1994

    Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1993

    A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here: Adrienne Rich in the Eighties and Nineties (edited with Jacqueline Brogan), Women’s Studies, 1998

    The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press, 2003

    Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader, Heyday Books, 2003

    The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (edited with Robert J. Bertholf), Stanford University Press, 2004

    Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov:The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (edited with Robert J. Bertholf), Stanford University Press, 2006

    American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

    C. Day-Lewis, The Golden Bridle: Selected Prose (edited with Bernard O’Donoghue) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017

    Adrienne Rich: Poetry and Prose (edited with Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi &Brett Millier) New York: W. W. Norton, 2018

    Adrienne Rich, Selectred Poems (edited with barbara Charlesworth Gelpi & Brett Millier) New York:W> W> Worton, 2018

  • Jonathan Gienapp

    Jonathan Gienapp

    Associate Professor of History and of Law

    BioJonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Principally a scholar of Revolutionary and early republican America, he is particularly interested in the period’s constitutionalism, political culture, and intellectual history. More generally, he is interested in the method and practice of the history of ideas.

    His first book, *The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era* (Harvard University Press, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. More specifically, it investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning, in transforming the practices through which one could justifiably interpret the document, helped in the process alter how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities. In the process, it considers how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018. It has been reviewed in The Nation, was the subject of a symposium at Balkinization, and was chosen for the 2019 Publius Symposium co-hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and the Stanford Center for Law and History. He wrote about some of the book's central themes in an op-ed for the Boston Globe, and has discussed the book on "New Books in History" and "The Age of Jackson Podcast" as well as in interviews for The Way of Improvement Leads Home and the Harvard University Press Blog.

    Gienapp has also written on a range of related topics pertaining to early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, originalism and modern constitutional theory, and the study of the history of ideas. He has published articles and book chapters in a host of venues, including the Journal of the Early Republic, Law and History Review, The New England Quarterly, and Constitutional Commentary.

    He has written extensively on the relationship between history and constitutional originalism and is completing a book on that subject, entitled "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique," which is under contract with Yale University Press and to be published in early 2024.

    He is also at work on a large book on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, currently entitled "We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood." It tells the story of the Preamble's early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance as a way of exploring the broader struggle over popular sovereignty and national union in the early United States.

    He has lectured widely on the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding era. Among other appearances, he discussed the Constitution's history in an episode of the podcast, "Writ Large," participated in a National Constitution Center Town Hall, "The Founders' Library: Intellectual Sources of the Constitution," was interviewed about the history of election disputes in the United States for The New York Times, and discussed the history of minority rule in the United States on NPR's All Things Considered. He also helped compile the National Constitution Center's Founders' Library.