School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 21-33 of 33 Results

  • Lesley Robertson

    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.

  • Aileen Robinson

    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.

  • Jesse Rodin

    Jesse Rodin

    Associate Professor of Music

    BioJesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the Renaissance. Immersing himself in the original sources, he sings from choirbooks, memorizes melodies and their texts, and recreates performances held at weddings, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts. As Director of the Josquin Research Project (josquin.stanford.edu), he uses digital tools to explore a large musical corpus. As director of the ensemble Cut Circle (cutcircle.org), he works with world-class singers to animate Renaissance music.

    Rodin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and the American Musicological Society. For his work with Cut Circle he has received the Prix Olivier Messiaen, the Noah Greenberg Award, Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), and a Diapason d’Or.

    He is the author of "Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel" (Oxford University Press, 2012), editor of a volume of the L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition (2014), and co-editor of "The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music" (2015). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, Acta Musicologica, and other major journals. A recent essay in Early Music tackles the longstanding problem of the Josquin canon, classifying all 346 pieces somewhere attributed to Josquin in descending order of confidence.

    His forthcoming monograph offers a new theory of how fifteenth-century polyphonic music happens in time. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar and performer, Rodin argues that composers activated a new collection of compositional building blocks to create a powerful and imaginative range of musical experiences (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

    Cut Circle performs internationally. With the Belgian label Musique en Wallonie, the ensemble recently embarked on a complete recording of Josquin's music; the first album appeared in November 2023. Cut Circle has also published recordings devoted to two riveting anonymous masses of the fifteenth century (2021), the complete songs of Johannes Ockeghem (2020), the late masses of Guillaume Du Fay (2016), and music in the Sistine Chapel in the time of Josquin (2012). A short film titled "Sounds of Renaissance Florence" recaptures the soundscape of fifteenth-century Italy. A disc of songs and motets by Josquin is scheduled for release soon.

    A passionate teacher, Rodin has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses at institutions such as Princeton University, the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France).

    At Stanford Rodin directs the Facsimile Singers, in which students develop native fluency in old musical notation. He has organized symposia on the composer Johannes Okeghem, medieval music pedagogy, and musical analysis in the digital age. In addition to undergraduate and graduate music courses, he teaches a class on late-medieval feasting that marries art, music, poetry, and politics with hands-on experience in the kitchen.

  • Jonathan Rosa

    Jonathan Rosa

    Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop insights into ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first offers frameworks for understanding ethnoracial contradictions across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.

  • Janice Ross

    Janice Ross

    Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emerita

    BioJanice Ross, Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and former faculty director of ITALIC, Stanford's residence based Freshman arts immersion program, has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and Ph.D degrees from Stanford. Her research interests and books focus on the intersections of social issues and their expression through performance. They include, Like A Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale Univ. Press 2015), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press 2007),winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007), Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin Press 2001/ University of Florida Press, Second Edition/2020) and, co-edited with Susan Manning and Rebecca Schneider, The Futures of Dance Studies, (University of Michigan Press (2020). Her research interests concern performance and social justice with a particular focus on tensions between political and aesthetic expression. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross Cultural Perspective, (Routledge, 2017),The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2019) Soloists and The Modern Dance Canon (Univ. Press of Florida, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the 2016 CORD Award for Outstanding Contributions to Dance Research , an NYU Fellowship for the Center for Ballet and the Arts (2018) and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (Italy 2022). Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars.

  • Jorge Ruffinelli-Altesor

    Jorge Ruffinelli-Altesor

    Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Emeritus

    BioProfessor Jorge Ruffinelli (Uruguay), a disciple of Angel Rama at the University of Uruguay, followed him as Director of the literary section of the seminal Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1968. In 1973 he was Adjunct Professor of the Latin American literature program (directed by Noé Jitrik) at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1974 he emigrated to México, where he was appointed Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias at the Universidad Veracruzana, a position he held for for twelve years. At the Universidad Veracruzana he was also Professor in the school of Letters, and collaborated in all the major cultural journals and newspapers of the Latin American continent. In 1986 he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary journal Texto crítico for twelve years. A member of various international editorial boards, in the United States he has directed the journal Nuevo texto crítico since 1987.

    He has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism and more than five hundred articles, critical notes and reviews in journals throughout the world. A recognized authority on Onetti, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Latin American literary history, during the nineties his critical work has centered on Latin American cinema. In 1993 he filmed a documentary on Augusto Monterroso for which he interviewed major Mexican writers and critics. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles on feature films from and about Latin America. His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968, a project that analyzes the work, marketing, and reception of over more than fifty authors (Ana Solari, Milagros Socorro, Karla Suarez, Mayra Santos, David Toscana, Rodrigo Fresan, Juan Forn, Martin Kohan, Jorge Vopli, among others). His teaching centers on the intersection of the interests above and cultural politics.

  • Nancy Ruttenburg

    Nancy Ruttenburg

    William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures

    BioNancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.

    Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.

    Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.