School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-24 of 24 Results

  • Stephen Haber

    Stephen Haber

    A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Economics

    BioStephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy).

    Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals.
    He is the author of five books and the editor of six more. Haber’s most recent books include Fragile by Design with Charles Calomiris (Princeton University Press), which examines how governments and industry incumbents often craft banking regulatory policies in ways that stifle competition and increase systemic risk. The Battle Over Patents (Oxford University Press), a volume edited with Naomi Lamoreaux, documents the development of US-style patent systems and the political fights that have shaped them.

    His latest project focuses on a long-standing puzzle in the social sciences: why are prosperous democracies not randomly distributed across the planet, but rather, are geographically clustered? Haber and his coauthors answer this question by using geospatial tools to simulate the ecological conditions that shaped pre-industrial food production and trade. They then employ machine learning methods to elucidate the relationship between ecological conditions and the levels of economic development that emerged across the globe over the past three centuries.

    Haber holds a Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has been on the Stanford faculty since 1987.
    From 1995 to 1998, he served as associate dean for the social sciences and director of Graduate Studies of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He is among Stanford’s most distinguished teachers, having been awarded every teaching prize Stanford has to offer.

  • Heather Hadlock

    Heather Hadlock

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioHeather Hadlock studies 18th- and 19th-century French and Italian opera, with a focus on changing norms for representing masculinity in opera on nineteenth century stages and in contemporary productions of classic operas. Her research repertoire encompasses Italian bel canto opera, Berlioz, Offenbach, operatic masculinities, opera in the age of its digital mediation, and divas and technology. She approaches operatic voices and performance through feminist theories of difference, vocality, and embodiment; gender and sexuality studies; and dynamics of adaptation between opera, literature, and video. She has directed Stanford's interdisciplinary Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and served on the Phiip Brett Award committee and board of the AMS LGBTQ Study Group. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Nineteenth-Century Music.

  • Robert Harrison

    Robert Harrison

    Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus

    BioProfessor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair of Italian Literature. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2006 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic. He is also lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

    Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with various topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society. Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, deals with the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, and in French with Le Pommier (subsequently appeared in German and Chinese translations). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press. In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions." The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.

  • Stephen Harrison

    Stephen Harrison

    Senior Lecturer in Music

    BioStudied with George Neikrug, Andor Toth, Jr., Margaret Rowell, Eugene Lehner.

    Artistic Director, Ives Collective (2015-)
    Founding member, Ives String Quartet. Cellist (1998-2015)
    Founding member, Stanford String Quartet (1983-1997).

    Solo cellist, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

    Former principal, the Chamber Symphony of San Francisco, New England Chamber Orchestra, The Opera Company of Boston.

    Principal cellist, Mendocino Music Festival; Faculty coach, Emerging Artists Program, Mendocino Music Festival
    Faculty member, SoCal Chamber Music Workshop
    Cellist, Telluride Chamber Music Festival

    Former faculty/cellist at the Rocky Ridge Music Center, Centrum/Port Townsend (WA),

    Recordings for CRI, Laurel Records, New Albion, AIX Entertainment, Delos, Centaur, and Music and Arts Recordings of America.

  • Gabrielle Hecht

    Gabrielle Hecht

    Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History, Professor (by courtesy) of Anthropology, and Senior Fellow at FSI. She is President of the Society for the History of Technology.

    Hecht's research explores the inside-out Earth and its wastes in order to reveal the hidden costs of the so-called "energy transition," with research sites in the Arctic, the Andes, southern Africa, and west Africa. Her new book, Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke, 2023), received the 2024 PROSE Award in Government and Politics from the Association of American Publishers.

    Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Power in the Anthropocene," "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She supervises dissertations in science and technology studies (STS), transnational history, and African studies. Her undergraduate course in "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age" was built in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA).

    Hecht’s 2012 book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as Uranium Africain, une histoire globale (Le Seuil 2016), and a Japanese translation is due out in 2021. Her first book, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (1998/ 2nd ed 2009), explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology, and nuclear culture in reactor operations. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology, and has appeared in French as Le rayonnement de la France: Énergie nucléaire et identité nationale après la seconde guerre mondiale (2004/ 2014).

    Her affiliations at Stanford include the Center for African Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Center for Global Ethnography, the Program on Urban Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. Hecht taught in the University of Michigan’s History department for 18 years, where she helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). She served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center, and participated in its long-term collaboration with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (South Africa).

    Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others. She serves on numerous advisory boards, including for the Andra, France’s national radioactive waste management agency.

  • David Hills

    David Hills

    Associate Professor (Teaching) of Philosophy

    BioI did my undergraduate work at Amherst and went on to graduate school at Princeton. Since then I've taught at Harvard, UCLA, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Michigan, Berkeley, and Stanford. I resumed my graduate career a little while back -- from a distance, as it were -- receiving the PhD in 2005.

    I'm married to another philosopher, Krista Lawlor.

    My interests continue to center in aesthetics, but they have spilled over into pretty much every branch of philosophy at one time or another.

    Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 34: Im Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht. (In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest — the one who crosses the finish line last.) I'm not sure I believe this, but it's a comforting thing to read.

  • Stephen Hinton

    Stephen Hinton

    Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioSpecial fields: aesthetics, history of theory, music of Weill, Hindemith and Beethoven.

    Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts. He is currently chairman of the Department of Music, having previously served in that position from 1997–2004 and 2000-2021. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik; Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks; the critical editions of Die Dreigroschenoper (with Edward Harsh) and Happy End (with Elmar Juchem) for the Kurt Weill Edition; Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works.

    He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. Recent articles include “Beauty” (with Nick Zangwill) for The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2020); “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Historiography of the Middle” for The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow (2023); and “Weill's Cinematic Imagination” for The Works of Kurt Weill: Transformations and Reconfigurations in 20th-Century Music (2023). His monograph Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (UC Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater, has been published in a revised German edition as Kurt Weills Musiktheater: Vom Songspiel zur American Opera (Suhrkamp, 2023). Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of edX online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019).

  • Allyson Hobbs

    Allyson Hobbs

    Associate Professor of History

    BioAllyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford University. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on cnn.com, slate.com, and in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.

    Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. A Chosen Exile has been featured on All Things Considered on National Public Radio, Book TV on C-SPAN, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, the Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, the Madison Show on SiriusXM, and TV News One with Roland Martin. A Chosen Exile has been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.”

  • Blair Hoxby

    Blair Hoxby

    Professor of English

    BioBlair Hoxby writes on literature and culture from 1500 to 1800. Two of his foremost interests are the commercial culture and the theatrical practices of the period. Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) examines the impact of the commercial revolution on writings of major seventeenth-century poets such as Milton and Dryden. Together with Ann Coiro, he is editing a large multi-author collection of essays on Milton in the Long Restoration. Two of his new books nearing completion focus on tragic dramaturgy. What Is Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon seeks to free the early modern poetics of tragedy and the early modern theatrical repertoire from the expectations erected by the romantic and post-romantic philosophy of the tragic that has dominated tragic theory from Schelling to the present. Reading for the Passions: Performing Early Modern Tragedy argues that the passions, not deeds or character, hold the keys to early modern tragic performance.

    Recent and forthcoming articles include Passion, for 21st-Century Approaches: Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry Turner (forthcoming, OUP); What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550-1795, Comparative Literature 64 (2012): 1-32; Allegorical Drama, in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong, in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machowsky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and "Areopagitica and Liberty," in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  • Hector Hoyos

    Hector Hoyos

    Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature

    BioHéctor Hoyos is a scholar of modern Latin American and comparative literature. He writes about ideological critiques of globalization in the post-1989 Latin American novel, the articulation of critical theory and new materialism in the region’s cultural production, and related topics. His current monograph in progress examines the works of Gabriel García Márquez from a law and humanities perspective.

  • Stephanie Jane Hunt

    Stephanie Jane Hunt

    Lecturer

    BioStephanie is an actor, director, and teacher of voice and acting. As a core member of the Bay Area theatre company, Word for Word, Stephanie has acted in numerous productions, including Tobias Wolff’s Sanity, Colm Tóibín’s Silence, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of her Peers. She played Lizzie Borden in The Fall River Axe Murders by Angela Carter directed by Amy Freed. For Word for Word, she directed the productions of Bullet in the Brain and Lady's Dream by Tobias Wolff, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones, which played at the Z Space before touring France. She has acted with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Campo Santo, Aurora Theatre, the Magic Theatre, Berkeley Shakespeare, the One Act Theater, and in New York at La Mama. For two years with Pulp Playhouse, Stephanie performed late-night comedy improv with O-Lan Jones and Mike McShane at the Eureka Theater. She has taught voice at ACT in the Summer Training Congress, and at the University of San Francisco, Chabot College, and Sonoma State University. She has directed a number of university productions, most recently at USF, where she directed Twelfth Night, and adapted and directed Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock. Her training includes an MFA from the American Conservatory Theater and certification as an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. Stephanie is committed to creating and teaching ensemble-based theater with a focus on heightened language.

  • Nadeem Hussain

    Nadeem Hussain

    Associate Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of German Studies

    BioI received my B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 1990. I then went to the Department of Philosophy at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I completed a Ph.D. there in 1999. I also spent the academic year of 1998-99 at Universität Bielefeld in Germany. I have been teaching at Stanford since 2000.