School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 20 Results

  • Lauren O'Connell

    Lauren O'Connell

    Assistant Professor of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe O'Connell lab studies how genetic and environmental factors contribute to biological diversity and adaptation. We are particularly interested in understanding (1) how behavior evolves through changes in brain function and (2) how animal physiology evolves through repurposing existing cellular components.

  • Thomas A O'Keefe

    Thomas A O'Keefe

    Lecturer

    BioThomas Andrew O’Keefe is the President of Mercosur Consulting Group, Ltd. [https://www.mercosurconsulting.net], a legal and economic consulting firm that assists companies with their strategic business planning for South America as well as advises Latin American firms exporting to the United States. He has been a principal of Indigenous ADR [https://www.IndigenousADR.com) since 2024.

    Mr. O’Keefe is a dual national of the United States and Chile. He is bilingual in English and Spanish, and fluent in French and Portuguese. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia University, and received his J.D. from the Villanova University School of Law. In 1986, he worked for the legal departments of the Chilean Human Rights Commission and the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (the human rights office of the Archdiocese of Santiago). He also worked as an associate for a number of years at the Wall Street law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn and the Boston-based Gadsby & Hannah before returning to study at the University of Oxford, where he received an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies (History and Economics) in 1992. He has taught courses on Colonial Latin America, Western Hemisphere economic integration, the political economy of the Southern Cone Countries of South America, energy and climate cooperation in the Western Hemisphere, and U.S.-Latin America diplomatic history at American University, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and Stanford University. He served as Chair of the Western Hemisphere Area Studies Program at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute between 2011 and 2016. During the spring 2015 semester, he also taught a seminar on International Human Rights Law at the Villanova University School of Law.

    Mr. O’Keefe is the author of numerous book chapters and articles on Latin American economic integration, globalization, energy security, and climate change, and has lectured extensively on these topics both in the United States and abroad. He has also been invited to brief U.S. government officials and testify before the U.S. Congress on developments within MERCOSUR and the Free Trade Area of the Americas project. He is the former Managing Editor of Focus Americas, an analytical review of business and legal developments throughout the Western Hemisphere. He is the author of Latin American Trade Agreements (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc. 1997-), Latin American and Caribbean Trade Agreements: Keys to a Prosperous Community of the Americas (Leiden NL: Martinus Nijhoff (Brill), 2009), and Bush II, Obama, and the Decline of U.S. Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere (New York: Routledge, 2018).

    In 2001, Mr. O’Keefe participated in the USAID/RAPID project as an African Growth & Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade specialist based in Gaborone, Botswana. In 2005, he received a Fulbright Scholars Award to lecture on international trade topics at the National Universities of Córdoba and Rosario in Argentina and conduct research on the Argentine energy sector for a chapter in a book published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in 2007. In 2011, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Specialist Award to lecture on the Peru-United States Free Trade Agreement at the Law School of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima. Between October 2005 and October 2006, he was the Legal and Economic Integration Specialist for the USAID's Caribbean Open Trade and Support Program based in Antigua and Barbuda. He served as Chief of Party of USAID's Caribbean Business Enabling Environment Reform Activity based in Barbados between July 2022 and July 2023.

  • Khalid Obeid

    Khalid Obeid

    Lecturer

    BioKhalid Obeid holds an Ed.D degree in Organization and Leadership from the School of Education at the University of San Francisco and a MPA from Notre Dame de Namur University. He received his B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Bir Zeit University in Palestine. Dr. Obeid is an ACTFL Certified OPI and WPT Tester/Rater in Arabic. He enjoys literature and loves teaching the Arabic language. His favorite activity is watching, playing and coaching soccer.

  • Josiah Ober

    Josiah Ober

    Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, Professor of Political Science, of Classics, by courtesy, of Philosophy and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution

    BioJosiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. His primary appointment is in Political Science; he holds a secondary appointment in the Classics and courtesy appointments in Philosophy and the Hoover Institution. His most recent books are The Greeks and the Rational: The discovery of practical reason (University of CaliforniaPress 2022) and Demopolis: Democracy before liberalism in theory and practice Cambridge University Press 2017). His ongoing work focuses on rationality (ancient and modern), the theory and practice of democracy, and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers address AI ethics, socio-political systems, economic growth and inequality, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.

    He is author or co-author of about 100 articles and chapters (many available on his Academia.edu page) and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), Athenian Legacies 2005), Democracy and Knowledge (2008), and The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, UC-Irvine, and UC-Berkeley. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006).

  • Jean Oi

    Jean Oi

    William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
    On Leave from 01/01/2024 To 03/31/2024

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPolitical economy and the process of reform in transitional systems, with particular focus on corporate restructuring and fiscal politics. Oi’s new project empirically assess the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by taking an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests. Is the BRI is a tightly coordinated central state effort, as some assert, or another example of local state development taking advantage of global opportunities?

  • Kathryn Meyer Olivarius

    Kathryn Meyer Olivarius

    Assistant Professor of History

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an historian of nineteenth-century America, interested primarily in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. My research seeks to understand how epidemic yellow fever disrupted Deep Southern society. Nearly every summer, this mosquito-borne virus killed up to ten percent of the urban population. But it also generated culture and social norms in its fatal wake. Beyond the rigid structures of race and unfreedom in Deep Southern society, I argue there was alternate, if invisible, hierarchy at work, with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people awaiting their brush with yellow fever languishing in social and professional purgatory. About half of all people died in the acclimating process.

    In New Orleans, alleged-imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a justification for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy where certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relations, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently-immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, pro-slavery, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation-status, I argue, played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in antebellum New Orleans.

    Most of all, disease provided the tacit justification for who did what work during cotton and sugar production, becoming the essence of an increasingly elaborate and tortuous justification for widespread and permanent black slavery. In the Deep Southern view, only enslaved black people could survive work like cane cutting, swamp clearing, and cotton picking. In fact, proslavery theorists argued, black slavery was positively natural, even humanitarian, for it protected the health of whites—and thus the nation writ large—insulating them from diseased-labor and spaces that would kill them.

    By fusing health with capitalism in my forthcoming book Necropolis, I will present a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society.

    I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West.