School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-10 of 24 Results
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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
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
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
Associate Professor of History and of Law
BioJonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation's early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.
His first book, *The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era* (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 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. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning altered how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing 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 8Spectator USA8 Book of the Year for 2018.
His second book, 8Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique* (Yale University Press, 2024), mounts a comprehensive historical critique of originalism. It argues that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists' unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution and its original meaning.
Gienapp's next book is 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. It probes the often entwined debates over popular rule, sovereignty, federalism, and constitutionalism in the nation's earliest years to understand the full meanings of the Constitution's opening words: "We the People of the United States."
Gienapp has also published a range of articles, book chapters, and essays on early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, modern constitutional interpretation, and the study of the history of ideas.
He is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice and has contributed to a number of historians' amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is also one of the founding editors of the Journal of American Constitutional History where he serves as a senior editorial advisor.
