School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 31-40 of 44 Results
-
Julius Smith
Professor of Music, Emeritus
BioSmith is a professor emeritus of music and (by courtesy) electrical engineering (Information Systems Lab) based at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Teaching and research pertain to music and audio applications of signal processing. Former software engineer at NeXT Computer, Inc., responsible for signal processing software pertaining to music and audio. For more, see https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/.
-
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).
-
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.
-
Ariel Stilerman
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioMy research examines the transformation of courtly literary and artistic practices into broader cultural forces across diverse social spaces.
My first book in English, Court Poetry and the Culture of Learning in Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2025), traces the evolution of waka poetry as it embraced a wider base of practitioners. Initially the purview of the aristocracy, waka gradually engaged military and priestly elites, then lower-ranking monks and warriors, and eventually urban merchants. As waka became a shared cultural language, its form and content were reshaped to reflect new social priorities. When its significance waned amid the cultural reforms of the 19th century, the tea ceremony evolved to assume its role as a gateway into traditional culture.
My second project, Meet the People Who Built Japan: The Culture of Work in Early Medieval Japanese Literature, explores discourses on technology, community, and affect in connection to the lives of working people. It examines poems in which aristocrats imagine themselves as workers, illustrated tales that bring crafting communities to life, and long-form narratives that reframe violence as a professional pursuit.
My broader interests include the tea ceremony, psychoanalysis, design, and critical making.
I welcome proposals on classical, medieval, and early modern literature and culture through the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as transdisciplinary projects through the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.
————————————————————————
Investigador, traductor y docente en literatura japonesa. Máster en estudios japoneses por la Escuela de Estudios Orientales y Africanos (Universidad de Londres) y en literatura clásica japonesa por la Universidad de Waseda, y doctor en literatura japonesa por la Universidad de Columbia. También egresado del programa del arte del té Urasenke Midorikai (Kioto).
Docente en las universidades de Columbia, del Estado de Florida y, actualmente, de Stanford. Miembro del comité académico del Instituto Superior de Estudios Japoneses de Buenos Aires.
Entre sus publicaciones se encuentran Los cien poemas del arte del té (Madrid: Satori, 2022), El archipiélago: Ensayos para una historia cultural de Japón., ed. con Paula Hoyos Hattori (Buenos Aires: Lomo, 2018), y Poema a tres voces de Minase (Madrid: Sexto Piso, 2016).
Cada año, su seminario de literatura japonesa premoderna ofrece a los estudiantes de maestría y de doctorado entrenamiento en japonés clásico, sino-japonés y paleografía. Cursos para estudiantes de grado incluyen Belleza y Renunciamiento (sobre literatura clásica, con docentes de Medio Oriente, Europa e India), Objetos Funcionales Japoneses (tecnología y estética, con docentes de Ingeniería Mecánica y Física), y La Cultura del Té en Japón. -
Meghan Sumner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
BioMeghan Sumner received her PhD in Linguistics at Stony Brook University. After completing her PhD, she was an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Psychology. She has been at Stanford University since 2007, where she is now an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Stanford Phonetics Lab, where she investigates variation and spoken language understanding.
Meghan’s research sits at the intersection of acoustic phonetics, language use and variation, social meaning, and cognitive psychology. She investigates attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension within and across individuals, groups, and languages, aiming to understand how different components of spoken language understanding work together. She and her students are testing the predictions of and hope to contribute to the development of a dynamic adaptive socially-anchored model of spoken language understanding. For the past twenty years, her work has focused on diverse talker and listener populations, drawing on variation to address issues in linguistics and psychology related to representation, asymmetries in memory, social effects in spoken language recognition, familiarity, experience, and categorization.
She is currently a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, working with public institutions and advocacy groups to apply language-based social science methods to increase protections for children living with domestic violence.
