School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 21-40 of 46 Results
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Vered Karti Shemtov
Eva Chernov Lokey Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Language and Literature
BioVered Karti Shemtov teaches Hebrew and comparative literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Shemtov is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Dibur.
Her publications include Changing Rhythms: Towards a Theory of Prosody in Cultural Context (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012) and several co-edited volumes, including Spoken Word, Written Word: Rethinking the Representation of Speech in Literature (2015), 1948: History and Responsibility (2013), and Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space (2005). She is also the author of numerous articles, including “Limbotopia: The ‘New Present’ and the Literary Imagination” (Journal of Comparative Literature, 2018, with Elana Gomel); “A Sense of No Ending: Contemporary Literature and the Refusal to Write the Future” (Dibur Literary Journal, 2018, with Elana Gomel); and “Poetry and Dwelling: From Martin Heidegger to the Songbook of the Tent Revolution in Israel” (Prooftexts). Her scholarship also examines the works of Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, Michal Govrin, A. B. Yehoshua, and Zeruya Shalev. She is the author of the entry “Hebrew Poetry: 1781–2010” in the revised edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Her current research project focuses on the poetics of rage and the literary, philosophical, and political forms through which rage is expressed and transformed in poetry and narrative. -
Sandra Wright Shen
Lecturer, Music
BioSteinway Artist Sandra Wright Shen has been described as “a classical pianist of the first order.” With her passion, musicality and inspiration, she aims to move hearts and uplift spirits through music.
Sandra has performed across 16 countries in over 600 concerts. Her appearances include prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Cultural Center, Monte Carlo Opera House, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Frankfurt Cultural Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, Taiwan National Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Hong Kong City Hall, and festivals including the Granada International Music Festival, Recontres Musicales de Chaon in France, Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI, Chelsea Music Festival, MasterWorks Festival and Steinway Society Concert Series.
She has been featured as guest artist with orchestras appearances around the world displaying a broad repertoire of 26 concertos. She served as Artist-in-Residence with the Charleston Symphony during the 2017–18 season. As a chamber musician, Sandra has performed with renowned artists including Vesselin Paraschkevov (former concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic), Brinton Smith (Houston Symphony), bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, and toured Asia with cellist Nina Kotova.
Sandra received first prize from several major international piano competitions, including First Prize at the 2012 France International Piano Competition, the 1997 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, the 1996 Mieczysław Munz Piano Competition, and the 1990 Taiwan National Piano Competition.
Her recordings include a debut CD featuring Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, both released by Taiwan’s Rolling Stone Music. Her latest album, Momentum, with cellist Miriam Smith, was released on Azica Records in 2022.
Sandra is a piano lecturer at the Stanford University and the piano chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division. She has served on the faculty of the Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI Young Artists Piano Program, Masterworks Music Festival, Music@Tetauchi, and American Fine Arts Festival in Europe and others. Previous academic appointments include Southern Illinois University and frequent invitations as Distinguished Guest Faculty at Furman University. Her students have won top prizes in competitions such as the International Piano Competition of Orléans (France), Stockholm International Piano Competition, the Chopin Foundation, Young Arts and the MTAC competitions.
Sandra performed live for WCQS Radio in Asheville, filmed a four-part television series “The Movements of the Master Composers” for Hong Kong TV and "Inspiration From Above" for US Creation TV, and hosted a classical music program for Taiwan’s IC Broadcast Radio FM97.5. Mixing music and philanthropy, Sandra has given benefit concerts for disaster victims, foster children, firefighters, music education for underprivileged children and San Jose Chamber Series.
Born in Taiwan, Sandra earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in Piano Performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with legendary pianist Ann Schein. Her teachers also include Zalina Gurevich and Jörg Demus.
www.sandrashen.com -
stephanie sherriff
Lecturer, Music
BioStephanie Sherriff is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer currently based in San Francisco, California. Their work with sound, video, and physical phenomena is ephemeral in nature and culminates as time-based installations and performances that deconstruct fragments of daily life through experimental processes. They received a BA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019. Their work has been featured both nationally and internationally at creative centers such as the Institute for Research Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), the Sfendoni Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), O. Festival, Gray Area, The Lab, Artists Television Access (ATA), and the Center for New Music (C4NM).
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Ory Shihor
Lecturer, Music
BioOry Shihor is an internationally acclaimed pianist and educator, serving on the piano faculty at Stanford University as Lecturer in Piano. His students have won major international competitions—including the Walter W. Naumburg International Piano Competition, Montreal International Piano Competition, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and the Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU International Piano Competition—and have gained admission to leading conservatories and universities such as Juilliard, Yale, and Curtis.
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, Mr. Shihor has been a frequent guest lecturer and master class teacher at major institutions worldwide, including the Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories, Seoul National University, National Taiwan Normal University, Northwestern University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Boston Conservatory, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Royal Northern College of Music.
Prior to joining Stanford, he served for over a decade as Professor of Piano Performance at the Colburn Conservatory, where he was also the founding dean of the Colburn Music Academy, a highly selective pre-college program for gifted young musicians. He is the co-founder of the Ory Shihor Institute, where he continues to teach advanced pianists and mentor the next generation of piano educators.
Mr. Shihor is a prizewinner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the Washington International Piano Competition, the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, and the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition. He is a Bösendorfer and Yamaha artist. -
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. -
Gi-Wook Shin
William J. Perry Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsKorean democratization; Korean nationalism; U.S.-Korea relations; North Korean politics; reconciliation and cooperation in Northeast Asia; global talent; multiculturalism; inter-Korean relations
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Matthew Smith
Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies
BioMatthew Wilson Smith’s interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
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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. -
Alice Staveley
Senior Lecturer of English
BioAlice Staveley teaches a range of courses on British modernism, contemporary British and Canadian fiction, and Virginia Woolf. She has won the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016-2017) and directs the Honors Program in English and the Digital Humanities Minor. She has taught in the Oxford tutorial system, the History and Literature concentration at Harvard University, and Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities Program (2001-2006). Research interests include: modernism; narratology; book and periodical history; women and the professions; feminist and cultural theory; and digital humanities. Her current book project examines Virginia Woolf's life as a publisher. Select publications include: Woolf’s short fictional feminist narratology; Woolf’s European reception; photography in Three Guineas; modernist marketing; and transnational archival feminisms. She co-founded and co-directs of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a critical digital archive of documents related to modernist publishing supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Roberta Bowman Denning Digital Fund for Humanities and Technologies. http://modernistarchives.com Recent digital humanities research involves quantitative analysis of modernist book-sales records.
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Ariel Stilerman
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI study premodern Japan through its manuscripts, objects, and languages.
I advocate for a “maker mindset” in the humanities. My research is just as much about building and doing as about reading and writing. My courses involve hands-on experiences and are often co-taught with colleagues in Classics, English, Religion, History, Mechanical Engineering, or Physics.
My first book, Court Poetry and the Culture of Learning in Japan (Harvard, 2026), charts the transformation of the poetry of the imperial court into a shared language for military and priestly elites, lower-ranking warriors, and eventually urban merchants.
My second project, Meet the People Who Built Japan, investigates the emergence of a “culture of work” in early medieval manuscripts and artifacts.
I welcome inquiries from students interested in classical through early modern Japanese literature through the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as those pursuing transdisciplinary work through the program in Modern Thought and Literature, and grad makers in the humanities through Making and Creative Praxis.
More broadly, I am interested in how we engage with the world through our senses and skills, exploring fields such as the tea ceremony, psychoanalysis, woodworking, sailing, olfactory cultures, technology, and design.
