School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 of 26 Results
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Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.
Professor Landy has appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "Philosophy Talk" (on narrative selfhood and on the function of fiction) and has on various occasions been a guest host of Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty).
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. -
William R. Leben
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent project:
"Advertising and the Language of Persuasion," a book for Oxford University Press based on my spring 2016-17 and 2019-20 Stanford courses
In press:
with Brett Kessler, the third edition of "English Vocabulary Elements," for Oxford University Press.. -
Haiyan Lee
Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsModern Chinese literature and popular culture; philosophy and literature; law and literature; cognitive science; affect studies; cultural studies of gender, sexuality, race, and religion; human-animal relations and environmental humanities
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Young Jean Lee
Denning Family Professor of the Arts
BioYOUNG JEAN LEE is a playwright, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by The New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She’s the first Asian-American female playwright to have had a play produced on Broadway. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Her plays have been performed in more than eighty cities around the world and have been published by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, and Theatre Communications Group. Her short films have been presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN Literary Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a Denning Family Professor in the Arts and Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford University.
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Justin Leidwanger
Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans
BioJustin Leidwanger's work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities, interaction, and maritime heritage. Ships and ports, especially in southeast Sicily and southwest Turkey, are central to exploring these themes in the field, providing evidence for connections and the long-term dynamics that shaped communities amid the economically, socially, and politically changing worlds from the rise of Rome through late antiquity and beyond.
Between 2013 and 2019, he led investigations of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” (Sicily), which sank while carrying nearly 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work continues through underwater survey, 3D analysis, and publication as well as immersive museum-based and pop-up exhibits and other initiatives. Project 'U Mari extends this collaborative and community-based field research across southeast Sicily, interrogating the heritage of diverse but co-dependent interactions with and across the sea that have long defined the central Mediterranean. These connections offer a resource for deeper critical engagement with the past, more meaningful identities in the present, and more sustainable development in the future. One facet of this work examines the socioeconomic dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna fishing through maritime landscape archaeology and documentation of the fading material culture and traditional knowledge of the mattanza. Another mobilizes archaeology to better understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a window into socio-environmental systems. These efforts simultaneously foreground heritage activism through community-based archaeology of the spaces, materialities, and memories of contemporary journeys of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.
Justin teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique archaeology, Mediterranean heritage, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology & Digital Heritage Lab (MEDLab) at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and collaborative resource for digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network analysis) and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis).
Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of five more volumes, including Regional Economies in Action (Vienna) and Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), he is currently working on two books. The first, entitled Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, arises from research with students in the field, lab, and museum, analyzing transport amphoras, port infrastructure, and other clues to ancient technologies of distribution. The second, The Tuna Trap, explores the entanglement of mobilities that have and continue to bind the shores surrounding the Strait of Sicily. -
Pavle Levi
Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts
BioPavle Levi is Associate Professor in the Art Department's Film and Media Studies Program.
He is also Faculty Director of Stanford's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).
Prof. Levi's primary areas of research and teaching include: European cinema (emphasis on Eastern Europe), aesthetics and ideology, film and media theory, experimental cinema, intersections of theory and practice.
He is the recipient of the 2011 Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. -
Emily Jane Levine
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research topics include a genealogy of academic concepts; the contemporary consequences of Germany and America’s divergent paths in knowledge organization; Jews and private philanthropy for scholarship; the historical tension between knowledge-for-its-own sake and applied knowledge; the global transfer of the kindergarten, mass schooling, and higher education; and the history and future of institutional innovation.
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Indra Levy
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy of Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioIndra Levy received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2001. She is the author of Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia, 2006) and editor of Translation in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2009). She has served as Executive Director for the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) since 2010. In 2022, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Irene Hirano Inouye Award from the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for her contributions to Japanese Studies. Her current work focuses on humor in Japanese literature, performance, and translation from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. Her research interests include modern Japanese literature and criticism; critical translation studies; gender and language; modern Japanese performance, especially in the Meiji and Taishō eras; and modern Japanese women’s intellectual history.
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Mark Lewis
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture, Emeritus
BioMark Edward Lewis’s research deals with many aspects of Chinese civilization in the late pre-imperial, early imperial and middle periods (contemporary with the centuries in the West from classical Greece through the early Middle Ages), and with the problem of empire as a political and social form.
His first book, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, studies the emergence of the first Chinese empires by examining the changing forms of permitted violence—warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the units of social organization, and in the defining practices and attitudes of the ruling elites. It thus traces the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city-states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state governed by a supreme autocrat and his agents.
His second book, Writing and Authority in Early China covers the same period from a different angle. It traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, including divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, collective writings of philosophical traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. It shows how these writings in different ways served to form social groups, administer populations, control officials, invent new models of intellectual and political authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs become potent, almost magical, objects.
His third book, The Construction of Space in Early China, examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. It shows how each higher unit—culminating in the empire—claimed to incorporate and transcend the units of the preceding level, while in practice remaining divided and constrained by the survival of the lower units, whose structures and tensions they reproduced. A companion volume, The Flood Myths of Early China, shows how these early Chinese ideas about the constituent elements of an ordered, human space—along with the tensions and divisions therein—were elaborated and dramatized in a set of stories about the re-creation of a structured world from a watery chaos that had engulfed it.
In addition to these specialist monographs, Lewis has written the first three volumes of a six-volume survey of the entire history of imperial China: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, and China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. These volumes serve as introductions to the major periods of Chinese history for non-specialists, and as background readings to introductory surveys. In addition to recounting the major political events, they devote chapters to the most important aspects of the society of each period: geographic background, cities, rural society, kinship, religion, literature, and law.
He has published a new monograph, Honor and Shame in Early China, which traces evolving ideas about honor and shame in the Warring States and early empires in order to understand major developments in the social history of the period. It examines the transformation of elites and the emergence of new groups through scrutinizing differing claims to “honor” (and consequent re-definitions of what was “shameful”) entailed in claiming a public role without necessarily being a noble or an employee of the state. -
Martin Lewis
Senior Lecturer in History, Emeritus
BioMartin W. Lewis is a senior lecturer in international history at Stanford University. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Environmental Studies in 1979, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in geography in 1987. His dissertation, and first book, examined the interplay among economic development, environmental degradation, and cultural change in the highlands of northern Luzon in the Philippines. Subsequently, he turned his attention to issues of global geography, writing (with Karen Wigen) The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press, 1997). He is also the co-author of a world geography textbook, Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (Prentice Hall), and is the former associate editor of The Geographical Review. Martin W. Lewis taught at the George Washington University and then at Duke University, where he was co-director of the program in Comparative Area Studies, before coming to Stanford University in the fall of 2002. He writes on current events and issues of global geography and at GeoCurrents.info.
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Li Liu
Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch interests:
Archaeology of early China (Neolithic and Bronze Age); ritual practice in ancient China; cultural interaction between China and other parts of the Old World; early domestication of plants and animals in China; theory of development of complex societies and state formation; settlement archaeology; urbanism; zooarchaeology; starch analysis; use-wear analysis; mortuary analysis; craft specialization -
Helen Longino
Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently pursuing research in several different areas. 1) The concept of interaction in science and philosophy. 2) The epistemology of science, especially social epistemology. 3) The contributions feminist philosophy of science can make to understanding science and sustainability policy in so-called developing countries? 4) How engagement with communities can inform philosophical analysis.