School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 of 31 Results
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Michael Ramsaur
Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEducation for Theatrical Lighting Design, nationally and internationally. Lighting design for Musicals.
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Vaughn Rasberry
Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
BioVaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, Race and the Totalitarian Century, questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, the defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.
His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English.
An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. -
Michael Rau
Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a live performance creator and director. I direct theater, musicals, opera, and I create digital media projects. I am always looking for new projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. I am interested in ways that technology can be used to tell stories, in virtual reality and games, and in live performance situations. I have created immersive theater pieces, and I enjoy working with new playwrights and writers to develop and shape their work.
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Rush Rehm
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and of Classics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStanford Repertory Theater (SRT) will present *Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond* at the Sebastopol Arts Center on November 7, 2021. The audio/visual version and/or the script is available for use by schools, arts councils, and environmental groups, free of charge, Contact stanfordrep@stanford.edu, or go to our website stanfordreptheater.com. Join the fight to save human and animal life on our planet!
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Rob Reich
McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI. Professor, by courtesy, of Education, of Philosophy and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at FSI
On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024BioRob Reich is professor of political science and, by courtesy, professor of philosophy and at the Graduate School of Education. He is a co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review), and associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He was faculty director at the Center for Ethics in Society for eight years, and he continues to lead its ethics and technology initiatives.
His scholarship in political theory engages with the work of social scientists and engineers. His newest work is on ethics and AI. His most recent books are System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, HarperCollins 2021) and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore, University of Chicago Press 2021). He has also written widely about philanthropy, including Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). His early work is focused on democracy and education, including Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, The Guardian, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. He was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review, of Giving Tuesday, and at the Spencer Foundation. -
James Reichert
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioProf. Reichert's field of specialization is Meiji-Taishô literature. He is especially interested in looking at the way that male-male sexuality is represented in literary texts from this period. His dissertation examines the treatment of male sexuality found in such works as Okamoto Kisen's Sawamura Tanosuke akebono zôshi (1880), Yamada Bimyô's Shintaishika Wakashu sugata (1886), Natsume Sôseki's Nowaki (1907) and Mori Ogai's Vita Sexualis (1909). Prof. Reichert is currently working on an article about the aesthetics of decadence and perversion found in the work of mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo.
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Joan Ramon Resina
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and of Comparative Literature
BioProfessor Resina specializes in modern European literatures and cultures with an emphasis on the Spanish and Catalan traditions. He is Director of the Iberian Studies Program, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Professor Resina is most recently the author of The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. This book is a reflection on the political use of historical memory focusing on the case of Spain. It analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origin and transmission of political violence and its endurance in the form of “negationism”. Some chapters consider “traumatic” phenomena, such as the bombing of Guernica, the Republican exile, the destruction of Catalan society, and the Holocaust. The book engages controversial issues, such as the relation between memory and imputation, the obstacles to reconciliation, and the problems arising from the existence of not only different but also conflicting memories about the past. Another recent book is Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles. Toronto University Press, 2017, which received the North American Catalan Society award for best book on Catalan Studies in 2019. This book condenses Pla's 47-volume work into 11 thematic units devoted to a central aspect of Pla's oeuvre. Resina explores the modalities of Pla's writing: stylistic, phenomenological, political, his relation to language, fiction, food, and landscape, and his approach to sexuality, women, and death. It introduces the reader to the colorful world of Catalonia's greatest 20th century writer through the author's gaze. Pla was a privileged observer of some of the crucial events of the 20th century, but he also captured the sensual infrastructure of his own country by recording every aspect of its reality.
Previous books include Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book, Resina lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies, contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions. Another publication since joining Stanford is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image since the late 19th century through the 20th century through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period.
Resina has edited eleven collections of essays on varied topics, most recently Inscribed Identities: Writing as Self-Realization. Routledge, 2019, and Repetition, Recurrence, Returns, Lexington Books, 2019.
He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to a large number critical volumes. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Editor of Diacritics. For several years he has been a regular contributor to the Barcelona daily press. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities, and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowships, and a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Cologne.. -
Judith Richardson
Senior Lecturer in English
BioJudith Richardson is a senior lecturer in English and program coordinator for American Studies. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judith began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities. The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Jessica Riskin
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioJessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at MIT before coming to Stanford, and has also taught at Iowa State University and at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation.
Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society. -
Lesley Robertson
Artist in Residence in Music
BioHaving celebrated 33 years with the internationally celebrated St. Lawrence String Quartet, Lesley Robertson (viola) is proud to make her life at Stanford University where along with her St Lawrence colleagues she directs the chamber music at the Department of Music. Ms. Robertson teaches viola, coaches chamber music, and also spearheads the SLSQ's Emerging String Quartet Program at Stanford and the SLSQ's annual Chamber Music Seminar. A graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, Ms. Robertson also holds a degree from the University of British Columbia where she studied with her mentor, Gerald Stanick. A founding member of the SLSQ, Ms. Robertson tours regularly, performing 100+ concerts worldwide per season (in Berlin, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Toronto, among others) but also nurtures close ties to the Stanford community performing in various classes, dormitories, laboratories, hospitals, and in Stanford's glorious Bing Concert Hall. She participated in the Marlboro Festival for several years and and toured with Musicians from Marlboro before co-founding the SLSQ. She has served on the jury of several international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition and the Concours de Genève. Summer music festivals include Spoleto Festival USA, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Banff Festival, Festival of the Sound, Santa Fe Chamber Music, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Bravo Vail, Music@Menlo and more. Robertson plays on a viola (1992) made by fellow Canadian John Newton and a bow (2016) by Francois Malo.
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Aileen Robinson
Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAileen K. Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century British theatre and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.
Robinson's current book manuscript explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century science museums. She investigates how theatrical performances and magic shows drew upon technological innovations and formed unique methods for disseminating scientific knowledge. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production.
