School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-9 of 9 Results

  • Londa Schiebinger

    Londa Schiebinger

    John L. Hinds Professor of the History of Science

    BioLonda Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender in science and technology. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.

    Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the findings at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. In 2022, she prepared the background paper for the United Nations 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women’s priority theme, Innovation and Technological Change, and Education in the Digital Age for Achieving Gender Equality and The Empowerment of all Women and Girls. Since 2023, Gendered Innovations has been a member of the UNFPA Equity 2030 Alliance.

    In 2011-2014, Schiebinger entered into major collaborations with the European Commission and the U.S. National Science Foundation to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Asia, and was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013 as Gendered Innovations: How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research. In 2018-2020, Schiebinger directed the European Commission Expert Group to produce Gendered Innovations 2: How Inclusive Analysis Contributes to Research and Innovation. Institutes for Gendered Innovations research opened in Soeul, South Korea, in 2015 and in Tokyo, Japan, in 2022.

    Schiebinger’s work has been featured in Science: A Framework for Sex, Gender, and Diversity Analysis in Research: Funding Agencies Have Ample Room to Improve Their Policies (2022); Nature: Sex and Gender Analysis Improves Science and Engineering (2019); Nature: Design AI so that it's Fair (2018); Nature: Accounting for Sex and Gender Makes for Better Science (2020).

    Her work in the eighteenth century investigates the circulation of knowledge in the Atlantic World. Her Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Her prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World investigates women's indigenous knowledge of abortifacients and why this knowledge did not travel.

    Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and the University of Valencia, Spain (2018); the Berlin Falling Walls Breakthrough Winner in Science & Innovation Management (2022). Her work has been translated into numerous languages. In 2022/23, she served as an advisor to the Berlin University Alliance.

  • Partha Pratim Shil

    Partha Pratim Shil

    Assistant Professor of History

    BioI am an historian of modern South Asia, specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century eastern India, with a developing research interest in the late eighteenth century. My work is located at the intersection of the fields of histories of state formation and labour history. I am particularly interested in the histories of government workers and how this labour history intrinsic to the state apparatus recasts our understanding of state formation.

    I am currently working on the manuscript of my first book, provisionally entitled 'Sovereign Labour: Constables and Watchmen in the Making of the Modern State in India, c. 1860-1950'. This monograph is a study of police constables and village watchmen in Bengal from the promulgation of the Police Act in 1861 until the upheavals of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. It reframes the history of constables and village watchmen, usually represented as government functionaries, as the history of a distinctive form of labour.

    The most important methodological innovation of this study is to bring methods from the historiography of labour in South Asia in conversation with the vast archive of the colonial police and to demonstrate how we can rewrite police history as labour history. Sovereign Labour charts the contours of the market of security labour in eastern India and locates the emergence of colonial police workforces within the rhythms of this labour market. It reveals the patterns in the history of constabulary recruitment; examines the implications of the conditions of police work for the nature of police power; delineates the internal segmentation within the world of police labour, and the defining role of caste in shaping modern policing apparatuses in colonial India; and brings out fresh evidence about the myriad modes of politics devised by police workers in this region. More broadly, my aim is to clear a conceptual ground for the study of forms of labour within the apparatuses of the modern state as well as demonstrate how the history of the labouring lives of government workers can provide a fresh entry point into the nature of the modern state in South Asia.

    Before joining Stanford, I was a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  • Kathryn Starkey

    Kathryn Starkey

    Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of English, of History and of Comparative Literature

    BioKathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of English, History, and Comparative Literature. Her work focuses primarily on medieval German literature from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and her research topics encompass visuality and materiality, object/thing studies, manuscript illustration and transmission, language, performativity, and poetics. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Palermo (2011) and Freiburg im Breisgau (2013 and 2018).

    Recent book publications (since 2012) include:

    * Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 800-1600, edited with Jutta Eming (Berlin/New York, 2021).
    * Animals in Text and Textile. Storytelling in the Medieval World, edited with Evelin Wetter. Riggisberger Berichte, Vol. 24 (Riggisberg, Switzerland, 2019).
    * Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited with Fiona Griffiths (Berlin/New York, 2018).
    * Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegger Manuscript, edited and translated with Edith Wenzel, TEAMS series in bilingual medieval German texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016).
    * A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s “Welscher Gast” (Notre Dame, 2013).
    * Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan, edited with Jutta Eming and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame, 2012).
    Professor Starkey is the PI for the Global Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/) for which she received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2018) as well as awards from the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies at Stanford (2016, 2017, 2018).

    Her current research projects include a co-authored (with Fiona Griffiths) textbook for the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220).

    Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).

    Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.