School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 31-40 of 93 Results
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Alex Ketley
Advanced Lecturer
BioAlex Ketley is an independent choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and LINES Ballet, he left dancing professionally to create The Foundry as a platform to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance. The company has allowed Ketley the freedom to pursue projects that would be difficult to realize within his commissioning career. A few examples of these are: Syntax, an hour long duet systemically using the mechanics of language as an organizing mechanism; Lost Line researched how the application of environment affects the generation of movement and studied in direct response to California's diverse physical landscapes; Please Love Me jettisoned the structure of performing in a theater context and was developed with a curiosity about how people genuinely connect and experience artwork; the No Hero Trilogy which was a multi-year project that explored what dance and performance means to the lives of people living throughout rural America, and Distal Imprint was a film created in collaboration with artist and Death-Row inmate Bill Clark. The Foundry’s diverse work has been enthusiastically received by audiences, the press, and funders.
For his independent work as a choreographer he has been commissioned extensively throughout the United States, as well as projects in Germany and Italy, and has received acknowledgement from the Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition, the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Saveaur, the Choo-San Goh Award, the Princess Grace Award for Choreography, four Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Residencies, the Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Award, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Choreographic Initiative Residency, a Kenneth Rainin Foundation New and Experimental Works Grant, three CHIME Fellowships, the Artistry Award from the Superfest International Disability Film Festival, and his work was featured on national television through an invitation from the show So You Think You Can Dance. His pieces and collaborations have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the categories of; Choreography, Company, and Ensemble, as well as nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design. In 2020 he became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors in the United States recognizing “individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts”.
As an educator he has taught extensively throughout the country and currently holds the position of Advanced Lecturer at Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies Department. He was the founding Resident Choreographer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance for fourteen years until its closure in 2018.
Since 2020 he has been collaborating with his friend Bill Clark who is a prolific artist and writer currently incarcerated on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison. They teach a class together at Stanford University called DanceAcution: Performance Practice, Death Row, and the Evolution of Cultural Reform. The class uses Bill’s vast experience as an artist and incarcerated individual as the platform for the student’s to develop new performance work. Bill is also collaborating with The Foundry on a new evening length work titled An Approximation of Resilience set to premiere in in 2024.
In addition to his artistic projects Alex has a daughter, Amara, who each day inspires him to see and experience the world from her unique vantage point. His wife Aline is a dancer and an integral collaborator in all of The Foundry’s projects created this decade. He is also on the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus, an organization whose work focuses on abolishing both the death penalty and LWOP (Life Without Parole). -
Kevin Khadavi
Undergraduate, Classics
BioI'm a member of the Class of 2026 at Stanford University, studying classics, history, and politics. I’m a seasoned public speaker with experience in speechwriting, research (both in the sciences and humanities), debate, and communication.
I’m a published author of historical papers and have undertaken numerous oral history projects with prominent historical figures, including Vice President Walter F. Mondale and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith; the topics of my work range from the 2nd Russo-Persian War to the 1963 meeting between James Baldwin and Robert Kennedy. I also have experience lecturing on military history.
I am deeply passionate about addressing societal challenges in our country and around the world. I care particularly about education inequality—what I believe is the root of many other societal problems—and am devoting time and energy to this cause through my work with RFK Human Rights and the Memorial Foundation.
In my free time, I enjoy listening to historical speeches (RFK’s Cleveland City Club Address is my favorite), reading Stoic philosophy, and jumping into Stanford’s fountains. I’m fascinated by spaceflight and am a big fan of Transcendental poetry. -
Suchismito Khatua
Ph.D. Student in Modern Thought and Literature, admitted Autumn 2023
Research Assistant, EnglishBioIf art is contingent rather than necessary, and often distinct from lived experience, how can it be mobilized to effect political change? In broaching this question, Suchismito Khatua’s research girdles the idea of the avant-garde, and its many figurations in a transnational and translational frame. Thus far, Smito has studied, presented, and published on the theory of the avant-garde, modernist “minor”/ “underground” literary cultures in the Bangla, Hindi, and Marathi languages, and concomitant histories of far-left militancy in post-independence India. His current interests span the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, histories of labor, subalternity, and resistance, theories of affect and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and translation.
Smito was formerly affiliated with the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he worked as a UGC Research Fellow and Undergraduate Course Instructor. In 2022, he was a visiting fellow in the research cluster “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School at Freie Universität Berlin.
Much of Smito’s thinking on living, and love, sweeps along a scissored trajectory of anarcho-communism and intersectional, anti-assimilationist queer politics. Poetry sustains him. -
John Kieschnick
Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioProfessor Kieschnick specializes in Chinese Buddhism, with particular emphasis on its cultural history. He is the author of the Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval China and the Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. He is currently working on a book on Buddhist interpretations of the past in China, and a primer for reading Buddhist texts in Chinese.
John is chair of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.
Ph.D., Stanford University (1996); B.A., University of California at Berkeley (1986).
