School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-48 of 48 Results
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Shiven Jain
Undergraduate, Anthropology
Undergraduate, Art & Art History
Undergraduate, International Comparative and Area StudiesBioThroughout my academic journey, I have sought to reimagine education as a collective act of meaning-making rather than a transactional exchange of knowledge. At Indus International School Pune, I collaborated with the English department to redesign our pedagogical framework: students alternated as instructors, teachers assumed the role of facilitators, and classrooms became dialogic spaces for co-construction. What began as a localized experiment now informs learning models across fifteen schools—a testament to the transformative potential of student agency when institutions make space for it.
This commitment to humanized learning permeates my broader work. Through IKKIS: The Podcast, I engage with actors, historians, and critics to examine postcolonial cinema as a site of resistance and reclamation. As the founder of the International Youth Philosophy Initiative (IYPI), I convene interdisciplinary seminars with peers from 37 countries, using literature, aesthetics, and critical philosophy to counter apathy and reanimate ethical inquiry.
Research forms the cornerstone of my intellectual life. For instance, my paper, Reclaiming Sociocultural Agency: The Resurrection of India and Africa in Postcolonial Cinema (The Schola, 2024), investigates narrative reclamation in the aftermath of cultural subjugation. I similarly approach media and cultural criticism as modes of activism: as Director of Content Development at RAYS Magazine, I lead initiatives that interrogate and reframe portrayals of mental health in popular culture, overseeing bimonthly publications rooted in accessibility and literacy. My essays for Film Companion, Youth Ki Awaaz, and Flick Deposit likewise aim to navigate—and, where necessary, dismantle—the ideological scaffolding of mainstream cinema.
To me, leadership and mentorship are natural extensions of intellectual agency. As a Teaching Assistant in English Language and Literature, I have conducted over 150 seminars exploring the intersections of language, politics, and aesthetics—facilitating sessions on figures such as Patrick Chappatte, Audre Lorde, Henrik Ibsen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Across research, pedagogy, media, and mentorship, my work is undergirded by a singular conviction: that education, if it is to remain ethical, must center not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the reclamation of voice, the recognition of alterity, and the radical possibility of collective transformation. -
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
LeRa Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComputer graphics & animation, physics-based sound synthesis, computational physics, haptics, reduced-order modeling
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Finn Järvi
Assistant Researcher | Cognition, Computation, Linguistics
BioGenerally interested in BCI (brain-computer interface), experimental psychology, behavioral neuroscience, computational linguistics and machine intelligence. You may reach me at my personal email address listed on my public profile (finnreidpersonal@gmail.com), as this is the account I use most frequently. My Google Scholar profile is listed under “Finn Järvi” (fɪn yærʋi); if it does not appear in search results, please contact me directly for a link.
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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 19th-21st century West and Equatorial Africa and the French-speaking Atlantic World. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; citizenship; urbanization; family and childhood; women, gender, and sexuality; colonialism; and race. -
Nicholas Jenkins
Professor of English
Current Research and Scholarly Interests20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry; digital humanities; art
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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 National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and have been recognized with the Story Prize, The Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. He was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. His teaching and research interests include the development of the novel, indigeneity, the oral tradition, counter narrative, trauma theory and speculative fiction.
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Emerson Johnston
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Winter 2025
Research Assistant for the Hoover Technology Policy Accelerator, HOOVER RESEARCHBioEmerson Johnston is a Research Assistant at the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator, where she works on the Stanford Emerging Technology Review and research related to emerging technologies and their impact on national security. She is currently on leave from Stanford’s MA program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine, where her thesis examines how institutional and historical legacies have shaped the framing of the internet as a telecommunications system rather than a civic or social space. More broadly, her research focuses on the sociocultural implications of digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and the intersection of technology and international policy. A first-generation, lower-income college student and a native of Los Angeles, California, she received an B.S. in ‘Politics, Philosophy, and Economics’ and in ‘History, Culture, and Law’, summa cum laude, from Northeastern University and an MA in International Policy from Stanford, where she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.
You can find more about her and her work on her website: https://www.emersonjohnston.org -
Gavin Jones
Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities
BioGavin Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (U of California, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton, 2007), Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge 2021). He has published articles on writers such as George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Zora Neale Hurston, in journals including American Literary History, New England Quarterly, African American Review, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Jones has edited a new version of a neglected classic of American literature, Sylvester Judd's "transcendental novel," Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845), and is the coeditor (with Michael J. Collins) of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023). He is currently working on two book projects: Zora Neale Hurston and the Art of Controversy and The Storytellers: The Work of Short Fiction in American Culture.
