School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 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. -
Leonardo Giorgetti
Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI explore the intersection of religious and secular knowledge in late medieval and early modern Italy and Europe, with an emphasis on the topics of canonicity, gender, female spiritual literature, and the reception of the three Italian Crowns (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio). I have published on the intellectual history of fifteenth-century Florence and seventeenth-century Venice with a focus on the representation of otherness in early modern women’s spiritual experience.
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Roland Greene
Director, Stanford Humanities Center, Mark Pigott KBE Professor, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioRoland Greene's research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present.
His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which follows the love poetry of the Renaissance into fresh political and colonial contexts in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical and comparative study of lyric poetics through the fortunes of the lyric sequence from Petrarch to Neruda. Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997). His essays address topics such as the colonial baroque, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti, Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Greene is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which was published in 2012. Prepared in collaboration with the general editor Stephen Cushman and the associate editors Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, this edition represents a complete revision of the most authoritative reference book on poetry and poetics.
In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association.
At Stanford Greene has been co-chair and founder of two research workshops in which most of his Ph.D. students participate. Renaissances brings together early modernists from the Bay Area to discuss work in progress, while the Poetics Workshop provides a venue for innovative scholarship in the broad field of international and historical poetics.
Greene has taught at Harvard and Oregon, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Danforth Foundation, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. -
Mark Greif
Associate Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioMark Greif’s scholarly work looks at the connections of literature to intellectual and cultural history, the popular arts, aesthetics and everyday ethics. He taught at the New School and Brown before coming to Stanford.
He is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton, 2015), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Prize for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. His book Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism. His current book concerns the history and aesthetics of pornography from the eighteenth century to the internet age.
In 2003, Greif was a founder of the journal n+1, and has been a principal member of the organization since. His books as co-editor and co-author have included The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street (n+1/FSG, 2012), Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011), and What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1/HarperCollins, 2010). His books and articles have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
He has been a Marshall Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
Greif has written for publications including the London Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde, and his essays have been selected for Best American Essays and the Norton Anthology. He remains interested in the relationships between high scholarship, literary and arts journalism, low culture, and small magazines. -
Thomas Grey
Professor of Music, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThis book project will involve a series of essays about the status of "beauty" as an aesthetic and critical concept in musical discourse and practice from the later 18th century through the advent of musical "modernism," starting with the reception of Wagner in the 1880s to c. 1900. The project seeks to mediate between philosophical conceptions of beauty (Kant and British aestheticians of the 18th century), criticism (Eduard Hanslick, centrally), and compositional practice over the long 19thC.
