School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 41-54 of 54 Results
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Edward Porter
Lecturer, English
BioEdward Porter’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Colorado Review, Catamaran, Barrelhouse, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. A native of New York City, he earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD from the University of Houston, and has been awarded fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the MacDowell Colony, and Stanford University, where he was recently a Stegner Fellow. He lives in Oakland.
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Steven Press
Associate Professor of History
BioSteven Press is an Associate Professor of History and an affiliated member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for African Studies, and the Stanford Center for Law and History.
Press' first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa (published Spring 2017 with Harvard University Press), received the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.
Press' second book, Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa, appeared in 2021 with Harvard University Press. It received the German Studies Association's Barclay Book Prize and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Title.
In an article in the Journal of Modern History, Press explored the exchanges between Germany, China, and Cuba that led to the USA's lease for Guantanamo Bay in 1903. His article on post-Napoleonic European nationalism appeared in Central European History, as did a more recent article about Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik.
Press graduated with a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt before coming to Stanford. His research interests include European sovereignty, international relations, and commodity networks. -
Robert N. Proctor
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTobacco and cigarette design; human origins and evolution; changing concepts of health and disease; medical history and medical politics
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Sarah Prodan
Assistant Professor of French and Italian
BioSarah Prodan is an Italianist, early modernist, and Michelangelo scholar whose research and teaching span literature, cultural history, religion, art, and intellectual history. Her work centers on Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries while pursuing broader questions about spirituality and religious experience, human nature and selfhood, perception and knowledge, creativity, and the ways individuals understand and fashion themselves in relation to others and the world.
Her first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association. Her forthcoming book, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy: Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a thematic genealogical study of the lyric as a site of devotion in early modern Italy, examining the relationship between literary expression and religious experience and addressing the broader non-materialist, non-dualist worldview exemplified in the religious verse itself.
Her current book projects include Michelangelo and the Knowing Self, an exploration of perception, knowledge, and selfhood across Michelangelo’s textual and visual production, and Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity, a transhistorical and transcultural study of competing conceptions of the human and the enduring tension among humanity, divinity, and animality.
Across her scholarship and teaching, Prodan brings literary analysis into conversation with cultural, religious, intellectual, and art history, using the early modern period both as an object of historical inquiry and as a vantage point from which to investigate enduring questions about human experience.
Prodan is also a writer and singer-songwriter. Her creative work includes Imminence: Florence, 1494, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence, and three albums of original music. -
Shannon Pufahl
Lecturer, English
BioShannon Pufahl is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program. She teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and writing across genres. She was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where she received a Centennial award, the University's highest honor for teaching assistants. She has published essays in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the Antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. Her novel, On Swift Horses, about gambling, sex, and the post-war American West, was published in 2019 by Riverhead Books.
Shannon also holds a PhD in American Literature and Culture from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation traces the animal welfare movement in the U.S. from its origins in the 19th-century, through the intense debates about animal life, suffering, and intelligence at century's end, and into the young adult animal novels of the early 20th-century.
She is the co-coordinator of The Writer's Studio, a weekly workshop series sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She also teaches in the Stanford Arts Intensive and online in Summer Session.
