School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-11 of 11 Results
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Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
Iranian Studies - Iran Media Projects, Iranian StudiesBioAshkan Nazari
M.A. Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran
A Kurdish-Iranian musician and researcher, Ashkan is currently an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford. He holds a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Tehran and a master's in ethnomusicology from Tehran University of Art.
Ashkan's more than 15-year-long research career has centred upon Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. The core area he is pursuing at Stanford covers the intersections between music, on the one hand, and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam and Kurdish identity, on the other. His interest also includes the development of ethnographic studies of the relationship existing between maqām as a cultural-musical concept, with ethnicity, racism and colonialism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with three titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music, the Anthropological Aspects of Maqām Music of Iraqi Kurdistan, with the latter set to be released soon. Many of his numerous articles have additionally appeared across prestigious Iranian journals, others presented at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first-ever philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan also taught Iranian music theory and Iranian ensembles, while instructing setār performance and analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively. -
Andrew Patrick Nelson
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2018
Ph.D. Minor, History
Ph.D. Minor, LinguisticsBioI am a PhD Candidate in the Japanese Linguistics track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. My research is motivated by two primary areas of inquiry: first, to what extent can methods in linguistic science be applied to historical documents to recover a speaker/writer intent and reader/listener interpretation? Second, in what ways are language changes perceived, categorized, and valorized; in what ways do those perceptions, categories, and values shape language ideology; and in what ways does language ideology in turn change language use? My work brings together methods in psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics in analyzing texts on language written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Japanese texts as a primary case study, but also leveraging sources in English, French, and German for a transnational perspective.
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Bertrand Ngong
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2023
BioMy name is Bertrand C. Ngong. I am originally from Cameroon, a Central African country that still bears the scars of German colonial presence in linguistic, architectural, toponymic, cultural, political, and even memorial aspects to this day. Growing up, this dual African and German heritage became deeply ingrained in me, guiding my steps first toward Germanic studies and then towards African studies. My reflections aim to comprehend how these two legacies interconnect, mutually influence each other, and shape the present-day relations between the German-speaking cultural space and Africa. I am particularly interested in the cultural and intellectual productions of Black people in the German language and/or about Germany. Historically, I investigate the African sources of the historiography of German colonization in Black Africa. Moreover, I closely follow current German-African affairs, especially concerning issues of reparations, restitution of artworks, and repatriation of African remains stolen during German colonization in Black Africa. Lastly, my reflections also seek to challenge and decolonize a certain perception of Germanic studies that would limit this field exclusively to the borders of Germany and Germanic countries.
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Quyen Nguyen-Hoang
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in Art History, admitted Spring 2025BioQuyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Hà Nội.
Her recent translations include the English translation of Chronicles of a Village, a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện (Yale University Press 2024), and the Vietnamese translation of Samuel Caleb Wee’s poetry collection https://everything.is/ (AJAR Press 2024).
While a curator at Sàn Art, she wrote Masked Force (2022), a bilingual book interleaved with the war photographs of Võ An Khánh. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in Poetry, Jacket2, Modern Poetry in Translation and other venues.
