School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-50 of 459 Results
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Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Peer Teaching Mentor, History Department
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentCurrent Role at StanfordCo-coordinator of the Religion, Politics, and Culture Workshop, sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center
Communications Coordinator of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University
Graduate Mentor for Undergraduate Honors Thesis Writers -
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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Ali Madani
Lecturer
BioAli Madani is Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in English at Stanford.
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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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Raghu Mahajan
Visiting Assistant Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research interests are wide-ranging:
1) In the context of gravity, how does spacetime emerge from its dual quantum system? How does the dual quantum system encode the answers to questions that involve local physics in semi-classical gravity? How do you avoid the "firewall" paradox in the context of black-hole evaporation?
2) How do you calculate electrical and heat currents in strongly-coupled many-body systems? How do you explain the linear-in-temperature resistivity in high-temperature cuprates?
3) Use tensor network methods to study electrical and heat transport and also the real-time dynamics of systems out of thermal equilibrium. -
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).
