School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-20 of 26 Results

  • Christine Jacobs-Wagner

    Christine Jacobs-Wagner

    Dennis Cunningham Professor, Professor of Biology and of Microbiology and Immunology

    BioChristine Jacobs-Wagner is a Dennis Cunningham Professor in the Department of Biology and the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford University. She is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms and principles by which cells, and, in particular, bacterial cells, are able to multiple. She received her PhD in Biochemistry in 1996 from the University of Liège, Belgium where she unraveled a molecular mechanism by which some bacterial pathogens sense and respond to antibiotics attack to achieve resistance. For this work, she received multiple awards including the 1997 GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists. During her postdoctoral work at Stanford Medical School, she demonstrated that bacteria can localize regulatory proteins to specific intracellular regions to control signal transduction and the cell cycle, uncovering a new, unsuspected level of bacterial regulation.

    She started her own lab at Yale University in 2001. Over the years, her group made major contributions in the emerging field of bacterial cell biology and provided key molecular insights into the temporal and spatial mechanisms involved in cell morphogenesis, cell polarization, chromosome segregation and cell cycle control. For her distinguished work, she received the Pew Scholars award from the Pew Charitable Trust, the Woman in Cell Biology Junior award from the American Society of Cell Biology and the Eli Lilly award from the American Society of Microbiology. She held the Maxine F. Singer and William H. Fleming professor chairs at Yale. She was elected to the Connecticut academy of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology and the National Academy of Sciences. She has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2008.

    Her lab moved to Stanford in 2019. Current research examines the general principles and spatiotemporal mechanisms by which bacterial cells replicate, using Caulobacter crescentus and Escherichia coli as models. Recently, the Jacobs-Wagner lab expanded their interests to the Lyme disease agent Borrelia burgdorferi, revealing unsuspected ways by which this pathogen grows and causes disease

  • Lochlann Jain

    Lochlann Jain

    Professor of Anthropology

    BioJain is an award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Visiting Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London, and a Research Affiliate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. His work aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the history of medical research. Jain is the author of Injury (Princeton UP: 2006); Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013); and a book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (U of Toronto Press: 2019).

    Jain is currently working on two books. The first, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, develops the concept of The WetNet, which refers to fluid bonding among humans and animals in ways that create pathways for the transmission of pathogens. Specifically, mid-century bioscientific practices such as blood harvesting and transfusion, and vaccine development and testing involved exchanges in human and animal effluvia, the risks of which have largely been disavowed. Jain’s current book project elucidates the concept of The WetNet through a rigorous history of the hepatitis B virus and the development of the first hepatitis B vaccine.

    The second project, “The Lung is a Bird and a Fish,” is a cultural history of drowning in prose and drawing.

  • 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.

  • Hakeem Jefferson

    Hakeem Jefferson

    Assistant Professor of Political Science

    BioI am an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where I am also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. I received my PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.

    My research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. I am especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, I examine the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and work to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.

    My dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the 2020 Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association.

  • Nicholas Jenkins

    Nicholas Jenkins

    Associate Professor of English

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

  • Saumitra Jha

    Saumitra Jha

    Associate Professor of Political Economy at the GSB, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research & Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Economics

    BioSaumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.

    Saumitra holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Center Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He was voted Teacher of the Year by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow Class of 2020. He received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance and his co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the 2020 Oliver Williamson Best Paper Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics.

  • Tomas Jimenez

    Tomas Jimenez

    Professor of Sociology

    BioTomás Jiménez is Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He is also Director of the undergraduate program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Director of graduate studies in sociology. His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His forthcoming book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents). His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity(University of California Press, 2010) draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. The book was awarded the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos/as Section Distinguished Book Award. Professor Jiménez has also published this research in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

    He is currently working several other projects. The first looks at how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2005. A second project (with social psychologist John Dovidio (Yale), political scientist Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts), and social psychologist Yuen Ho (UCLA), uses survey data (with embedded experiments) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape the sense of belonging and related intergroup attitudes, behaviors, and support for immigration policies among immigrants and host-society members in the United States. This project is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the United Parcel Service Endowment Fund at Stanford. A third project (with graduate students Anna Boch and Katharina Roessler) uses Yelp! data to examine the contextual factors that predict whether Mexican food has entered a mainstream. In another project, Professor Jiménez, with Marrianne Cooper (Clayman Institute, Stanford University), and Chrystal Redekopp (Laboratory for Social Research, Stanford), are studying how Silicon Valley residents find alternative forms of housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

    Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He has been named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2017-19). He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center, and he has written opinion-editorials on the topic of immigrant assimilation in several major news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

  • 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.