School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 of 140 Results
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Thomas MaCurdy
Professor of Economics, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
BioThomas MaCurdy is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, and he further holds appointments as a Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. MaCurdy has published numerous articles and reports in professional journals and general-interest public policy venues, and he has served in an editorial capacity for several journals. He is a widely-recognized economist and expert in applied econometrics, who has developed and implemented a wide range of empirical approaches analyzing the impacts of policy in the areas of healthcare and social service programs. MaCurdy directs numerous projects supporting the activities and operations of the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), General Accounting Office (GAO), and Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), and Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), and he has served as a member of several standing technical review committees for many federal and state government agencies (e.g., CBO, Census, BLS, California Health Benefits Review Program). MaCurdy currently supervises several empirical projects that support CMS regulatory policy responsible for the establishment of Healthcare Exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.
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Mari Liis Madisson
Affiliate, H & S Programs
BioI am a semiotician specialising in conspiracy theories, information influence activities, and strategic narratives. I earned my PhD from the University of Tartu in 2016, where I examined the semiotic construction of identities in the online communication of the Estonian extreme right. I work in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, and I have also held visiting scholar positions at Queen’s University Belfast, the Estonian Military Academy, Tbilisi State University. Over the years, I have delivered more than twenty courses on semiotics, digital culture, media analysis, and critical approaches to misinformation, and I have given invited guest lectures at eight European universities.
My first area of expertise concerns conspiracy theories and digital culture. I am recognised as one of the leading qualitative scholars in the Baltics in this field. I have co-authored two monographs—Strategic Conspiracy Narratives: A Semiotic Approach (Routledge, 2020, with Andreas Ventsel) and Varjatud märgid ja salaühingud (2023, with A. Ventsel and M. Lotman)—and I have published extensively on multimodal conspiracy discourse and strategic communication related to conspiracy theories. I also served as Work Package Leader in the ERA-NET CHANSE project REDACT, coordinating comparative research teams across Europe.
A second strand of my work focuses on information influence activities, hybrid threats, and strategic narratives. Since 2019, I have published in journals such as Media, War & Conflict, European Security, and Armed Forces & Society, analysing the discursive construction of threats, Russian influence operations, and the securitisation of disinformation. As a member of the NATO SAS-177 Information Warfare Research Group, I collaborate with strategic communication specialists from multiple member states and gain practical insight into contemporary information-security challenges.
My third line of research is applied: I have participated in several Estonian and international projects that promote and examine societal and cultural resilience and civic media literacy. I co-developed a transmedia learning platform for the Estonian Defence Forces to help conscripts recognise and critically interpret hostile influence techniques. I also contribute to the Erasmus+ initiative Students’ Critical Digital Literacy Development Against Disinformation. This work connects semiotic research with the needs of defence, education, and civil-society partners.
My contributions to political semiotics, conspiracy theory studies, and the analysis of information influence activities have been recognised with the Science Award of the Republic of Estonia (2024), the country’s highest scientific honour. I regularly participate in public discussions on digital culture and disinformation, and I collaborate with journalists, policymakers, and civil-society organisations. I also review for leading international journals in semiotics and communication studies.
I am open to collaboration on projects related to the study of conspiracy theories, information influence activities, strategic narratives, hybrid threats, digital culture, civic and digital resilience, and qualitative approaches to contemporary security discourse. -
Beatriz Magaloni
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComparative Politics, Political Economy, Latin American Politics
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Ayu Majima
Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies
Visiting Scholar, Center for East Asian StudiesBioAyu Majima is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at Stanford University and an Associate Professor at School of Global Japanese Studies, Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. She works at the intersection of modern Japanese social and cultural history, the history of sensibilities, and anthropological and sociological approaches to everyday life, family, and contemporary society—grounded in a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective.
Ayu Majima conducts interdisciplinary research on modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture, examining how Japan has reinterpreted and reconfigured its own modernity through encounters with the United States. Her work employs a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective to illuminate the interplay between everyday life, family, and the cultural sensibilities that shape them.
Her first monograph, The Melancholy of Skin Color: Racial Experience in Modern Japan (in Japanese, Chūōkōron-Shinsha, 2014), received the Rengō-Sundaikai Academic Prize and later appeared in a Chinese edition published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (Beijing) in 2021. She has also explored the modern history of meat-eating in Japan, with her research featured in ARTE’s Invitation au Voyage, and has examined the global circulation of Japanese food culture in a cultural policy study commissioned by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Building on her postdoctoral work at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University—where she presented “The Chrysanthemum and the Foot: Civilization, Cleanliness and Shame in Modern Japan”—Majima continues to investigate modern Japanese subjectivity across three interrelated dimensions: everyday life practices such as Japan’s rejection of outdoor shoes and the cultural role of slippers; family structures, including the marginal emotional presence of fathers and patterns of mother–child overcloseness; and cultural sensibilities, especially concepts of cleanliness and shame, through the cultural lens of athlete’s foot.
At Stanford, Majima is developing a new ethnographic and cultural project based on a concept she herself has coined, provisionally titled “The California Paradox.” This term—her original analytic formulation—examines how wealth, competition, and contemporary forms of capitalism, including wellness capitalism and the gendered cultures of the tech industry, are reshaping the conditions, expectations, and trajectories of human life in the Bay Area (and increasingly, the world). Early reflections from this project appear in her monthly essay series “Japan Code,” published in Jiji Press’s financial journal Kin’yū Zaisei Business (Tokyo, Japan). -
Eric Malczewski
Affiliate, Bill Lane Center for the American West
Visiting Scholar, Bill Lane Center for the American WestBioTo learn more about Eric Malczewski, please visit his website here: www.intrinsicliberty.com
Eric Malczewski is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in The Bill Lane Center for the American West.
He is a social theorist working in the areas of social and political theory, philosophy of the human sciences, sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, comparative historical sociology, and culture. He has published on the organizing principles of social science, epistemological issues in social and sociological theory, nationalism, culture, and conceptions of nature in American culture and 19th century American landscape painting. He is an expert on the thought of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tonnies. His current work develops the theory of human will and its major political philosophical implication -- namely, the theory of intrinsic liberty.
His work has been published in Sociological Theory, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, The Journal of Historical Sociology, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Cosmos+Taxis, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, The Turkish Journal of Sociology, The Anthem Companion to Robert K. Merton, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in STEM (SAGE), Research Handbook on Nationalism (Oxford: Edward Elgar), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Handbook of Cultural Sociology (SAGE), and Handbook of Politics: State and Society in Global Perspective (Routledge).
He is also a Faculty Fellow at Yale University at the Center for Cultural Sociology (with which he has been affiliated since 2014), a Miller Fellow at the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History, and a Member of The Ciceronian Society. He has been an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech since 2018. In 2023-2024 he also was a Humanities Associate at Virginia Tech. He has served on several prize committees for the American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association.
From 2009 to 2018 he was at Harvard University, where he was a Lecturer on Social Studies teaching social and political theory. He also served on the Board of Advisors and advised Senior honor’s theses. His primary affiliation was with Quincy House from 2009-2017. From 2013-2018 he oversaw Harvard's Visiting Undergraduate Student Program and also was affiliated with Dudley House.
He received awards at Harvard for Distinction in Teaching in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017. In 2013 he received Social Studies' highest accolade for advising – the Harvard University Barrington Moore Award for Excellence in Advising. In 2015 he was awarded the Harvard University Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising (Harvard’s highest award for advising).
He lives in San Francisco, CA. -
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.
