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

    Associate 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, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) 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 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/his)

    Kristopher Geda (he/him/his)

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioI am the coordinator of English for Foreign Students 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 and, by courtesy, of Law

    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 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.

  • 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

    Professor of 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.