School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 12 Results

  • Branislav Jakovljević

    Branislav Jakovljević

    Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities

    BioMy research is highly interdisciplinary. I find it very rewarding to study performance in the context of visual arts, film and digital media, literature and poetry, critical theory, as well as larger social and historical processes. Most recently, I have been focusing on climate change and environmental justice. Over the past year, I have co-edited with my colleagues from TAPS Diana Looser and Matt Smith a two-part special issue of TDR: The Drama Review on performance and climate change. This research and teaching interest comes from my more long-term engagement with performance and politics.

    My most recent monograph in English is Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945-1991 (University of Michigan Press, 2016) which received the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater for 2016-17 and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award, 2017. It has been translated into Serbian (2019) and Slovenian (2021). I co-translated and edited Radomir Konstantinović’s book The Philosophy of Parochialism, a groundbreaking analysis of the relation of the national literature and the formation of totalitarian ideas and political practices in a small European nation during the first half of the 20th century (University Michigan Press, 2021). My most recent book project is The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press), in which I investigate the relationship between performance art and theories of ideological formations from the 1970s until the present.

    I hail from Yugoslavia, the country that was located in central and western Balkans, in southeastern Europe. There, I attended Drama Schools at universities in Skopje and Belgrade (present-day Northern Macedonia and Serbia, respectively). I worked as Dramaturg in professional theaters during and immediately after the completion of my BFA studies.

    Most of my views on politics, ethics, justice, and the arts were informed by the unraveling of Yugoslavia in a series of bloody civil wars in the 1990s. I was active in anti-war movements before I left the country and remained active in pro-democracy publications in Serbia and the region of the former Yugoslavia. Some of these writings have been collected in the book Frozen Donkey and Other Essays (Smrznuti magarac i drugi eseji, Komuna Links, Belgrade 2017).

    Both my MA and PhD are from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. While pursuing my PhD, I was active in the New York downtown theater and alternative press scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the subsequent years, I served on the board of Performance Studies international (PSi) and chaired the 19th PSi conference held at Stanford in June of 2013.

    Before joining Stanford in 2006, I taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and University of Minnesota. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in my home department, over the years I served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and Chair (2015-2019). Some of the highlights from my tenure as Chair are: devising a strategic plan for the department that yielded the current structure of our undergraduate program, supervising the return of the department to the renovated Roble Gym, the establishment of Nitery Experimental Theater as the first fully student-run theater space on campus, working with the Dean’s office to set up Carl Weber graduate fellowships, and opening TAPS season-planning process to include all members of the department who are willing to participate (students, faculty, staff).

  • Doug James

    Doug James

    Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComputer graphics & animation, physics-based sound synthesis, computational physics, haptics, reduced-order modeling

  • Rachel Jean-Baptiste

    Rachel Jean-Baptiste

    Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

    BioPh.D., Stanford University
    M.A., Stanford University
    A.B., Bryn Mawr College

    Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 20th and 21st century French-speaking Central and West Africa and the Atlantic world. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; gender and sexuality; racial thought and multiracial identities; urban history; citizenship. Jean-Baptiste is currently researching the history of women, slavery, and urban history in Haiti and the French-speaking Atlantic world.

  • Nicholas Jenkins

    Nicholas Jenkins

    Associate Professor of English

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry; digital humanities; art

  • Adam Johnson

    Adam Johnson

    Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing

    BioAdam Johnson is a Professor of English with emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the 2015 National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper's Magazine, Granta, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.