School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 10 Results

  • Liisa Malkki

    Liisa Malkki

    Professor of Anthropology, Emerita

    BioLiisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Malkki’s most recent book, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (with Allaine Cerwonka) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her most recent book-length project (based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present) examines the changing interrelationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

  • Douglas McAdam

    Douglas McAdam

    Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor, Emeritus

    BioDoug McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author or co-author of 18 books and some 85 other publications in the area of political sociology, with a special emphasis on race in the U.S., American politics, and the study of social movements and “contentious politics.” Among his best known works are Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, a new edition of which was published in 1999 (University of Chicago Press), Freedom Summer (1988, Oxford University Press), which was awarded the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award as well as being a finalist for the American Sociological Association’s best book prize for 1991 and Dynamics of Contention (2001, Cambridge University Press) with Sid Tarrow and Charles Tilly. He is also the author of the 2012 book, A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press), with Neil Fligstein and a book due out this summer on the historical origins of the deep political and economic divisions that characterize the contemporary U.S. The book, from Oxford University Press, is entitled: The Origins of Our Fractured Society: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America (with Karina Kloos). He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

  • Mark McGurl

    Mark McGurl

    Albert Guérard Professor of Literature

    BioMark McGurl's scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011. His most recent book, Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon (Verso 2021), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

    McGurl’s first book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics.

    McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books before earning his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins. He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center.

  • Alison McQueen

    Alison McQueen

    Associate Professor of Political Science and, by courtesy, of History

    BioAlison McQueen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.

    McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.

    Her other ongoing research projects explore methods of textual interpretation, the ethics and politics of catastrophe, and treason in the history of political thought.

  • Jisha Menon

    Jisha Menon

    Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature

    BioJisha Menon is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical theory and performance studies; law and performance; race and the carceral state; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; gender and sexuality; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her current research project, Confessional Performance: The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood, explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. The book argues that attending to the fictive constitution of the person within the law allows us to highlight the artifice, indeed, the aesthetics that are central to jurisprudence. Her four books explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her newest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, the book delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence and performance, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

  • Ana Raquel Minian

    Ana Raquel Minian

    Associate Professor of History

    BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.

    Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s work in immigration and ethnic history; the Western Association of Women Historians’ Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best monograph in the field of history by a member; the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for best book in humanist sociology; and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history by the Organization of American Historians and received an honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award given to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.

    Minian's second book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention (Viking Press, forthcoming, April 2024) reveals the history of the immigrant detention system from its inception in the 1800s to the present. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, the book gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these “black sites” exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn’t have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.

    Additionally, Minian has published articles in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.

    In 2020, Minian was awarded with the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

    Minian's third book project, "No Man’s Lands: A New History of Immigration Restriction," examines how during the late Cold War and its aftermath, U.S. officials created new spaces and territories designed to prevent Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants from entering the United States. Rather than a thought-out and coherent project, these various spatial enterprises were designed haphazardly in response to particular incidents and migrations.

  • Paula M. L. Moya

    Paula M. L. Moya

    Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

    BioMoya is currently the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE).

    She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). 

    Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.

    At Stanford, Moya has served as the Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).

    Moya is a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.

    Moya has been a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

  • Thomas Mullaney

    Thomas Mullaney

    Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

    He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.

    His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.