School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-20 of 41 Results

  • Izzy Benjamin Gainsburg

    Izzy Benjamin Gainsburg

    Research Scholar

    BioI'm a social psychologist and behavior scientist focused on how to help people do the most good. Currently, I am a Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. There, I serve as the Associate Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab, which is led by Professor Robb Willer.

    My current research fits into three categories: 1) basic science investigating the psychological underpinnings of compassion, moral concern, and altruism, 2) developing and testing behavioral science, with a focus on increasing cooperation and pro-democratic behaviors, and 3) meta-scientific efforts to understand which research questions and interventions are most impactful for psychologists and behavioral to pursue. In general, my work is informed by ideas from Effective Altruism.

    Before coming to Stanford, I completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School and University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. I received my PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2020.

  • 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.

  • Angela Garcia

    Angela Garcia

    Professor of Anthropology

    BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.

    Garcia’s most recent book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Set in Mexico City, it examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect each other. Central to this work are anexos (annexes), informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor, and which incorporate violence into their therapeutic practices. Anexos are widespread across Mexico (and increasingly in the United States) and are widely condemned as abusive, illegal, ineffective, and unethical. By situating anexos within a larger social and historical frame, and closely attending to life within and beyond these spaces, Garcia shows that anexos provide refuge from the catastrophic and everyday violence associated with the drug war. The book also demonstrates that anexos are the leading resource for the treatment of drug addiction among Mexico’s poor, and are an essential space of protection for individuals at risk of the intensifying violence in Mexico.

    Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty and colonial history in northern New Mexico. It argues that heroin addiction among Hispanos is a contemporary expression of an enduring history of dispossession, social and intimate fragmentation, and the existential desire for a release from these. Ongoing work in the U.S. explores processes of legal “re-entry” and intimate repair that incarcerated and paroled drug users undertake, particularly within kin networks.

    Currently, Garcia is studying the environmental, social, and bodily effects resulting from Mexico City’s ongoing desagüe, the massive drainage project initiated by Spanish colonists in the seventeenth century in the Valley of Mexico. Mexico City’s desagüe speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our time: water scarcity, humans’ relationship to changing ecologies, and chronic disease. This project examines how the desagüe remakes bodies, neighborhoods, and social worlds.

  • Gabriel Garcia, MD

    Gabriel Garcia, MD

    Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology and Hepatology) at the Stanford University Medical Center, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe natural history of common viral liver diseases of man is poorly understood, despite the fact that chronic liver diseases of man may result in death from liver failure or hepatocellular carcinoma.

  • Justin Gardner

    Justin Gardner

    Associate Professor of Psychology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHow does neural activity in the human cortex create our sense of visual perception? We use a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging, computational modeling and analysis, and psychophysical measurements to link human perception to cortical brain activity.

  • Kristopher Geda (he/him)

    Kristopher Geda (he/him)

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioI am the coordinator of English for Speakers of Other Languages in the Stanford Language Center. Additionally, I teach courses in academic writing, speaking, and listening to graduate students. I also teach a pedagogy and practicum class in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for both undergraduate and graduate students who want to explore English language teaching in the future. My main areas of interest are writing, grammar, and extra-curricular communicative skills such as developing the cultural literacy to successfully write professional documents like cover letters, CVs, and resumes, as well as interact socially in professional and personal environments. I speak Spanish and French well, and a little bit of Mandarin and Esperanto.

  • 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.

  • Michael Genesereth

    Michael Genesereth

    Associate Professor of Computer Science

    BioGenesereth is most known for his work on Computational Logic and applications of that work in Enterprise Management, Computational Law, and General Game Playing. He is one of the founders of Teknowledge, CommerceNet, Mergent Systems, and Symbium. Genesereth is the director of the Logic Group at Stanford and the founder and research director of CodeX - the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

  • Jonathan Gienapp

    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.

  • William Gilly

    William Gilly

    Professor of Oceans

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy work has contributed to understanding electrical excitability in nerve & muscle in organisms ranging from brittle-stars to mammals. Current research addresses behavior, physiology and ecology of squid through field and lab approaches. Electronic tagging plus in situ video, acoustic and oceanographic methods are used to study behaviors and life history in the field. Lab work focuses on control of chromogenic behavior by the chromatophore network and of locomotion by the giant axon system.

  • Judith L. Goldstein

    Judith L. Goldstein

    Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

    BioJudith L. Goldstein is the Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication and the Kaye University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her research focuses on international political economy, with a focus on trade politics. She has written and/or edited six book including Ideas, Interests and American Trade Policy and more recently The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law and Economics of the GATT and the WTO. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals.

    Her current research focuses on the political requisites for trade liberalization focusing both on tariff bargaining and public preferences. As well, she is engaged in the analysis of a large survey panel, which focuses on how economic hard times influences public opinion.

    Goldstein has a BA from the University of California Berkeley, a Masters degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from UCLA.

  • Deborah M Gordon

    Deborah M Gordon

    Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProfessor Deborah M Gordon studies the evolutionary ecology of collective behavior. Ant colonies operate without central control, using local interactions to regulate colony behavior.