School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-21 of 21 Results
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Rosaley Gai
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2020
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on depictions of food and eating in modern Japanese literature and media. In particular, I am interested in works that deal with an appetite for the strange and grotesque, and how such works impart the affective experience of eating and desire onto the reader.
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Enam Gbewonyo
Master of Fine Arts Student, Art Practice
BioEnam Gbewonyo is a British-Ghanian textile and performance artist, curator, and founder of the BBFA (Black British Female Artist) Collective - now defunct. Her art practice investigates identity – Black womanhood in particular, whilst advocating the healing benefits of craft. She uses performance as a vessel, creating live spaces of healing that direct audiences to a positive place of awareness, countering systems of oppression such as racism and sexism. Her work enables audiences to face the truth of the dark past surrounding colonial legacies and the emotions it brings forth.
Recent exhibitions include Memoria: récits d’une Histoire at Fondation H, Madagascar, Neo-Custodians: Woven Narratives of Heritage, Cultural Memory and Belonging at Bemis Center in Omaha, USA, DELLU her first institutional solo show at New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK, Body Poetics at Southampton’s GIANT Gallery, and Rites of Passage at Gagosian London. Her work has been exhibited and showcased internationally at the 58th Venice Biennale, Art X Lagos, and UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami. Her performance films have been selected for notable film festivals including; Portland Dance Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival and AVIFF Cannes Art Film Festival.
Gbewonyo’s works are in private and public collections including Fondation H, Madagascar and White & Case LLP, UK. She is a 2022 recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award and winner of the 2022 Dentons Art Prize and New Art Exchange Future Exhibition Prize respectively. She is also a fellow of Black Rock Senegal, Bemis Center, (Omaha, USA) and Fondation H, Madagascar artist residencies. -
Vera Geranpayeh
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsVera Geranpayeh is a PhD student in German Studies at Stanford University. Her research examines representations of female subjectivity and Otherness in German literature from the Middle Ages to the present. She analyzes figures whose gendered, epistemic, and embodied difference obstructs narrative progression and resists containment. Drawing on affect theory, queer theory, and feminist narratology she theorizes these characters as excessive—marked by a surplus of knowledge, bodily presence, or moral force that strains and reshapes the text’s architecture. Her work explores how gender operates not only thematically but structurally, driving plot, obstructing closure, and exposing the limits of narrative control. These figures appear as threats to the coherence of patriarchal order, revealing how gendered Otherness can destabilize the very frameworks meant to contain it. She advances feminist literary scholarship by developing a transhistorical framework for understanding how gendered figures of excess persist across genres and periods—not as elements resolved by narrative, but as forms that retain the power to intervene, refract meaning, and haunt narrative itself.
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Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024BioChristopher Spencer Gurley, Jr is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where he specializes in American Religion and is pursuing a Ph.D. minor in history. His research explores the intersection of African American history and U.S. Catholic cultural life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is specifically interested in the religio-racial histories of U.S. Catholicism, Black identity constructions, Catholicism in the rural south, and the socio-historical politics of class and belonging regarding Black masculinity and manhood.
Before joining the Stanford community, he studied U.S. History at Georgetown University as a Patrick Healy Fellow. Chris earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tennessee State University and his Master of Theological Studies degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. He also holds a Master of Arts in Religion degree from Yale Divinity School, where he was chosen to become an Elie Wiesel-Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar at Oxford University.
