School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 11-20 of 24 Results
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Gabrielle Hecht
Professor of History
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. She is President of the Society for the History of Technology, and Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.
Hecht's current 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 2023 book, *Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures,* received two 2024 PROSE Awards (for Excellence in Social Science and for Government and Politics) from the Association of American Publishers; it's a finalist for the 2024 Best Book Award from the African Studies Association.
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). 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. Before returning to Stanford in 2017, 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) and served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center.
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. -
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
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 recently served as chairman of the Department of Music (2022-24), having previously served in that position from 1997-2004 and in 2000-21. 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
Associate Professor of History
On Leave from 09/01/2024 To 12/31/2024BioAllyson 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.” -
Tamami Homma
Lecturer
BioBachelor's Degree in piano performance (Manhattan School of Music), Master of Music Degree in performance (RAM/University of London), LRAM (Licentiate, Royal Academy of Music), ARAM (honorary Associate, RAM). Studied with Byron Janis, Herbert Stessin (Juilliard School of Music), Christopher Elton, Hamish Milne, Dominique Merlet (Conservatoire de Genève), other masterclasses or private lessons with Andras Schiff, Alfred Brendel, Christopher Hogwood, Sarah Davis Buechner, Jerome Lowenthal, Piers Lane, amongst others. Champion of the music of British composer John McCabe, she contributed the chapter on his piano works for 'Landscapes of the Mind' published by Ashgate and recorded several CDs of his works including with McCabe, one recognized as 'Editor's Choice' and others consistently receiving five stars from Gramophone Magazine and BBC Music Magazine. She has also recorded other highly rated CDs of works by Chopin, Mozart, Rawsthorne and contemporary composers for SOMM, Dutton and Metier labels. Her recording of the piano quintet version with the Vilnius Quartet was 'CD of the Week' (The Independent, UK). As collaborative pianist, she has performed complete cycles of all Beethoven works for every instrument, played for classes of Maurice Hausson (violin), John Wallace (trumpet) as a student and later performed with Mats Lidstrom, Peter Sheppard-Skaerved at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, and founded the Tate Ensemble which performed at the Aldeburgh Festival and received high praise from the New York Times for their Carnegie Debut. Upon coming to the Bay Area in 2007 she has founded the Cal Arte Ensemble and has continued to perform and solo with many orchestras but also continues to record, supports local opera companies, coaches in vocal and ensemble, adjudicates in competitions in the US and abraod, and offers private lessons (is affiliated with CMTA and Vantage Academy in Hong Kong). She has worked as vocal and ensemble coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was Master Teacher at the Community School of Music & Art in Mountain View. She is most proud of her four children filling the home with their own various musical noises.
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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
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.