School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 41-60 of 88 Results
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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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Percy Liang
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Statistics
BioPercy Liang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (B.S. from MIT, 2004; Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, 2011) and the director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM). He is currently focused on making foundation models (in particular, language models) more accessible through open-source and understandable through rigorous benchmarking. In the past, he has worked on many topics centered on machine learning and natural language processing, including robustness, interpretability, human interaction, learning theory, grounding, semantics, and reasoning. He is also a strong proponent of reproducibility through the creation of CodaLab Worksheets. His awards include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019), IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016), an NSF CAREER Award (2016), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014), and paper awards at ACL, EMNLP, ICML, COLT, ISMIR, CHI, UIST, and RSS.
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Xing Liang
Basic Life Res Scientist
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMechanism of MT polarity establishment during PVD neuron dendrite outgrowing in C. elegans.
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Jared Duker Lichtman
Szego Assistant Professor of Mathematics
BioJared Duker Lichtman is a Szegő Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Jared earned his doctorate in 2023 at the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof. James Maynard.
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Andrei Linde
Humanities and Sciences Professor, Emeritus
BioWhat is the origin and the global structure of the universe?
For a long time, scientists believed that our universe was born in the big bang, as an expanding ball of fire. This scenario dramatically changed during the last 35 years. Now we think that initially the universe was rapidly inflating, being in an unstable energetic vacuum-like state. It became hot only later, when this vacuum-like state decayed. Quantum fluctuations produced during inflation are responsible for galaxy formation. In some places, these quantum fluctuations are so large that they can produce new rapidly expanding parts of the universe. This process makes the universe immortal and transforms it into a multiverse, a huge fractal consisting of many exponentially large parts with different laws of low-energy physics operating in each of them.
Professor Linde is one of the authors of inflationary theory and of the theory of an eternal inflationary multiverse. His work emphasizes the cosmological implications of string theory and supergravity.
Current areas of focus:
- Construction of realistic models of inflation based on supergravity and string theory
- Investigation of conceptual issues related to the theory of inflationary multiverse -
Scott W Linderman
Assistant Professor of Statistics
BioScott is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He is also an Institute Scholar in the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford AI Lab. His lab works at the intersection of machine learning and computational neuroscience, developing statistical methods to analyze large scale neural data. Previously, Scott was a postdoctoral fellow with Liam Paninski and David Blei at Columbia University, and he completed his PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University with Ryan Adams and Leslie Valiant. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and spent three years as a software engineer at Microsoft before graduate school.
