School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 273 Results
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Robert Waymouth
Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering
BioRobert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry Robert Waymouth investigates new catalytic strategies to create useful new molecules, including bioactive polymers, synthetic fuels, and sustainable plastics. In one such breakthrough, Professor Waymouth and Professor Wender developed a new class of gene delivery agents.
Born in 1960 in Warner Robins, Georgia, Robert Waymouth studied chemistry and mathematics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia (B.S. and B.A., respectively, both summa cum laude, 1982). He developed an interest in synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry during his doctoral studies in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology under Professor R.H. Grubbs (Ph.D., 1987). His postdoctoral research with Professor Piero Pino at the Institut fur Polymere, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, focused on catalytic hydrogenation with chiral metallocene catalysts. He joined the Stanford University faculty as assistant professor in 1988, becoming full professor in 1997 and in 2000 the Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry.
Today, the Waymouth Group applies mechanistic principles to develop new concepts in catalysis, with particular focus on the development of organometallic and organic catalysts for the synthesis of complex macromolecular architectures. In organometallic catalysis, the group devised a highly selective alcohol oxidation catalyst that selectively oxidizes unprotected polyols and carbohydrates to alpha-hyroxyketones. In collaboration with Dr. James Hedrick of IBM, we have developed a platform of highly active organic catalysts and continuous flow reactors that provide access to polymer architectures that are difficult to access by conventional approaches.
The Waymouth group has devised selective organocatalytic strategies for the synthesis of functional degradable polymers and oligomers that function as "molecular transporters" to deliver genes, drugs and probes into cells and live animals. These advances led to the joint discovery with the Wender group of a general, safe, and remarkably effective concept for RNA delivery based on a new class of synthetic cationic materials, Charge-Altering Releasable Transporters (CARTs). This technology has been shown to be effective for mRNA based cancer vaccines. -
Risa Wechsler
Director, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), Humanities and Sciences Professor and Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics
BioRisa Wechsler is the Humanities and Sciences Professor and the Director of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. She is also Professor of Physics and Professor of Particle Physics & Astrophysics at SLAC National Laboratory, Director of the Center for Decoding the Universe, and an Associate Director at Stanford Data Science. She is a cosmologist whose work investigates some of the most profound questions about our universe — how it formed, what it is made of, how it is structured, and what its future holds.
Her research focuses on understanding the evolution of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. She uses large numerical simulations, theoretical models, and the largest observed maps of the universe to explore these forces that shape the cosmos. Her recent work also investigates the formation and cosmological context of the Milky Way and probes dark matter through small-scale cosmic structure, and explores how data science and AI/ML can drive new understanding. Wechsler has played key leadership roles in major international collaborations including the Dark Energy Survey, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, and Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and time, a decade-long survey that will reveal the dynamic universe in unprecedented detail. She is recently involved in the Via Survey, which will map the Milky Way at high precision to probe dark matter physics in new ways.
Wechsler is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Shuyi Wei
Graduate Visiting Researcher Student, East Asian Studies
BioMy research field:
Culture study ｜Film criticism｜Contemporary literature -
Allen S. Weiner
Senior Lecturer in Law
BioAllen S. Weiner is an international legal scholar with expertise in such wide-ranging fields as international and national security law, the law of war, international conflict resolution, and international criminal law (including transitional justice). His scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and situations of widespread humanitarian atrocities. He also explores assertions by states of “war powers” under international law, domestic law, and just war theory in the context of asymmetric armed conflicts between states and nonstate armed groups and the response to terrorism. In the realm of international conflict resolution, his highly multidisciplinary work analyzes the barriers to resolving violent political conflicts, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weiner’s scholarship is deeply informed by experience; he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade advising government policymakers, negotiating international agreements, and representing the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.
Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. He was a law clerk to Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. -
Amir Weiner
Associate Professor of History
BioAmir Weiner’s research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. His first book, Making Sense of War analyzed the role and impact of the cataclysm of the Second World War on Soviet society and politics. His current project, Wild West, Window to the West engages the territories between the Baltic and Black Seas that were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, from the initial occupation to present. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; the Origins of Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.
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Barry R. Weingast
Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
On Leave from 01/01/2026 To 03/31/2026BioBarry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair, Department of Political Science, from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics. -
Kevin Wells
Adm Svcs Admstr 2, Physics
Current Role at StanfordExecutive Director, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics
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Leif Wenar
Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
BioLeif Wenar is a political philosopher. After receiving his AB at Stanford, he earned his PhD at Harvard, worked in Britain, and returned to Stanford in 2020.
He is the author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World and the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He is also the author of the entries for ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His articles have appeared in Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. He co-edited Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, as well as an autobiographical volume by the economist FA Hayek.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy.
His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force.
He is currently developing unity theory, a foundational account of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. His published work can be found at wenar.info. -
Paul Wender
Francis W. Bergstrom Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMolecular imaging, therapeutics, drug delivery, drug mode of action, synthesis
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Sarah Wert
Student Services, Communication
BioPhD in social psychology from Yale University.
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Lynn Marie Westphal, M.D.
Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility) at Stanford University Medical Center, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsInfertility, fertility preservation, oocyte cryopreservation
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John Weyant
Professor (Research) of Management Science and Engineering, of Energy Science Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioJohn P. Weyant is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Director of the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy and an an affiliated faculty member of the Stanford School of Earth, Environment and Energy Sciences, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. His current research focuses on analysis of multi-sector, multi-region coupled human and earth systems dynamics, global change systems analysis, energy technology assessment, and models for strategic planning.
Weyant was a founder and serves as chairman of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), a seventeen-year old collaboration among over 60 member institutions from around the world. He has been an active adviser to the United Nations, the European Commission, U.S.Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of State, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In California, he has been and adviser to the California Air Resources, the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission..
Weyant was awarded the US Association for Energy Economics’ 2008 Adelmann-Frankel award for unique and innovative contributions to the field of energy economics and the award for outstanding lifetime contributions to the Profession for 2017 from the International Association for Energy Economics, and a Life Time Achievement award from the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium in 2018. Weyant was honored in 2007 as a major contributor to the Nobel Peace prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2008 by Chairman Mary Nichols for contributions to the to the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee on AB 32.
Fields of Specialization:
Energy/Environmental Policy Analysis, Strategic Planning
Interests:
Overall goal is to accelerate the use of systems models at state, country, and global scales, aiming to provide the best available information and insights to government and private-sector decision makers. Specific areas include energy, climate change, and sustainable development policy, including emerging technologies and market design alternatives. Draws on concepts and techniques from science and engineering fundamentals (e.g., thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science, and electrical power systems), operations research, economics, finance, and decision theory. -
Katherine Whatley
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research examines the relationship between the written and the spoken word in Classical Japan. I take this relationship as the starting place and explore the role of music in Classical Japan through looking at words-as-song. From this vantage point, I argue that music was a primary mode of communication amongst people (especially women) and their surroundings—interpersonal, international, and inter-environmental. I am also a composer and koto performer working on a dissertation composition.
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James Wheaton
Lecturer
BioStanford: Visiting Lecturer since 1999: "Journalism Law". UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism, Senior Lecturer since 2003: "Journalism Law". First Amendment Project (nonprofit law firm since 1991): Founder and Of Counsel. Environmental Law Foundation (nonprofit since 1991): Founder and Of Counsel. Law Office of James Wheaton (since 1984): Principal. Awards: California Lawyer "Attorney of the Year" (3 times in 3 different specialties); Society of Professional Journalists (3 times, including Career Achievement Award); Playboy Foundation First Amendment Award; Ecology Law Quarterly Career Achievement; River Network River Hero Award. Owner/investor, New Parkway Theater. Investor, Camp Navarro. Co-Lead "JOBI: Coffee, Tea or Me" Burning Man camp.
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Lyris Wiedemann
Senior Lecturer in the Language Center
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research interests include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, acquisition of cognate languages, development of cultural competence, and translation. I am one of the creators of the international symposium on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: Acquisition and Teaching, which had its fifth edition in 2014, and an author and editor of several scholarly articles and books. My current focus is on the acquisition of Portuguese by speakers of Spanish and other Romance languages.
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Carl Wieman
Cheriton Family Professor and Professor of Physics and of Education, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe Wieman group’s research generally focuses on the nature of expertise in science and engineering, particularly physics, and how that expertise is best learned, measured, and taught. This involves a range of approaches, including individual cognitive interviews, laboratory experiments, and classroom interventions with controls for comparisons. We are also looking at how different classroom practices impact the attitudes and learning of different demographic groups.
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Karen Wigen
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioKären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography at Stanford. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano.
An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis, and to co-direct the "Oceans Connect" project at Duke University. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas ( University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016). -
Gail Wight
Professor of Art and Art History, Emerita
BioGail Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. She has an extensive international exhibition record, with over a dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Her work is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.
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Angie Wilcox
Senior Director of Operational Effectiveness, H&S Dean's Office
Current Role at StanfordSenior Director of Operational Effectiveness, School of Humanities and Sciences
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Michael Wilcox
Senior Lecturer of Comp Studies Race Ethnicity
BioMichael Wilcox joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University in 2001 as an Assistant Professor. His dissertation, entitled "The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Communities of Resistance, Ethnic Conflict and Alliance Formation Among Upper Rio Grande Pueblos," articulates the social consequences of subordination, and explores the processes of boundary maintenance at both regional and communal levels. During his graduate studies at Harvard, he was very involved in strengthening the Harvard University Native American Program and in designing and teaching award-winning courses in Native American Studies.
His recent publications include: The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact, University of California Press (2009) (book blog at: http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/?p=5000); Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous Response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; Journal of Social Archaeology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 92-117 (2010); Saving Indigenous Peoples From Ourselves: Separate but Equal Archaeology is Not Scientific Archaeology", American Antiquity 75(2), 2010; NAGPRA and Indigenous Peoples: The Social Context, Controversies and the Transformation of American Archaeology, in Voices in American Archaeology: 75th Anniversary Volume of the Society for American Archaeology, edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills (2010).
Professor Wilcox's main research interests include Native American ethnohistory in the American Southwest; the history of Pueblo Peoples in New Mexico; Indigenous Archaeology; ethnic identity and conflict; DNA, race and cultural identity in archaeology and popular culture; and the political and historical relationships between Native Americans, anthropologists and archaeologists. -
Jenessa Williams
Postdoctoral Scholar, Communication
BioDr Jenessa Williams (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Communication at Stanford University. Her academic research explores race, gender, social justice and feminist representation in popular music, intersecting with the study of online fan communities and internet cultures. Her forthcoming monograph is an investigation of audience reactions to #MeToo-era allegations of gendered misconduct made against alternative rock and hip-hop musicians. Jenessa has also worked as a consumer music journalist, writing for the likes of The Guardian, NME, The Forty-Five, Pitchfork, DIY and Alternative Press.
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Zach Williams
Lecturer
BioZach Williams' debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, was published by Doubleday in 2024. Beautiful Days was longlisted for the 2025 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and is a finalist for the 2025 California Book Award for First Fiction. Williams' work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run” was one of three that won The Paris Review a 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. Williams is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship.
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John Willinsky
Khosla Family Professor, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI work under the auspices of the Public Knowledge Project which is focused on extending access to, and the accessibility of, research and scholarship. The research is on student, professional, and public access to this educational resource, while PKP also engages in developing and designing open source software (free) publishing systems to improve the public and scholarly quality of peer-reviewed journals. This also involves international collaborations in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia are aimed at helping to better understand and strengthen scholarly publishing in those areas.
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Jeffrey J. Wine
Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe goal is to understand how a defective ion channel leads to the human genetic disease cystic fibrosis. Studies of ion channels and ion transport involved in gland fluid transport. Methods include SSCP mutation detection and DNA sequencing, protein analysis, patch-clamp recording, ion-selective microelectrodes, electrophysiological analyses of transmembrane ion flows, isotopic metho
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Sam Wineburg
Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDistinguishing what is true in our current digital morass; the teaching and learning of history
Latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, "Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online."
How young people make decisions about what to believe on the Internet.
New forms of assessment to measure digital literacy
The creation of Web-based environments for the learning and teaching of history -
Herman Winick
Professor of Applied Physics (Research), Emeritus
BioBorn and educated in New York City, he received his AB (1953) and his PhD (1957) from Columbia University. Following a postdoc position at the University of Rochester (1957-59) he continued work in high energy physics and accelerator development at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator at Harvard University (1959-73), serving as Assistant Director. He came to Stanford in 1973 to lead the technical design of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project (SSRP), now SSRL, and served as Deputy Director of the laboratory until his semi-retirement in 1998 (www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu). He has taught physics at Columbia, Rochester, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, University of Massachusetts, and Stanford. His 1970’s and 1980’s research developing periodic magnet systems (wigglers and undulators), had a major impact on synchrotron radiation sources and research facilities at Stanford and around the world. Beginning in 1992 he made major contributions to initiating and developing the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world’s first X-ray Free Electron Laser. Starting operation in 2009, the LCLS has shifted the major SLAC focus from high energy physics to x-ray sources and research. In 1997 he suggested SESAME, a synchrotron light source involving 9 countries in the Middle East. He has played a major role in the development of this project, on track to start research in 2016 (www.sesame.org.jo). He is now promoting a similar project in Africa. Throughout his adult life he has been an activist in helping dissidents and protecting academic freedom and human rights.
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Terry Winograd
Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus
BioProfessor Winograd's focus is on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, which recently celebrated it's 20th anniversary. He is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the "d.school") and on the faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)
Winograd was a founding member and past president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. He has advised a number of companies started by his students, including Google. In 2011 he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. -
Caroline Winterer
William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics and of Education
BioCaroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science.
She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, and the history of science.
She is the author of six books, including most recently How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024).
She is currently accepting graduate students. For more information on the PhD program in the Department of History, visit: https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs. -
Laura Wittman
Associate Professor of French and Italian
BioLaura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in how modernity articulates new relationships between religious experience, embodiment, mortality, health, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.
Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012. It explores the creation and reception of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – an Italian, French, and British invention at the end of the First World War – as an emblem for modern mourning, from a cultural, historical, and literary perspective. It draws on literary and filmic evocations of the Unknown Soldier, as well as archival materials, to show that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is not pro-war, nationalist, or even proto-Fascist. Rather, it is a monument that heals trauma in two ways: first, it refuses facile consolations, and forcefully dramatizes the fact that suffering cannot be spiritualized or justified by any ideology; second, it rejects despair by enacting, through the concreteness of a particular body, a human solidarity in suffering that commands respect. Anticipating recent analyses of PTSD, the Memorial shows that when traumatic events are relived in a ritual, embodied, empathetic setting, healing occurs not via analysis but via symbolic communication and transmission of emotion.
Laura Wittman is the editor of a special issue of the Romanic Review entitled Italy and France: Imagined Geographies (2006), as well as the co-editor of an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles on d’Annunzio, Marinetti, Fogazzaro, Ungaretti, Montale, Sereni, and Merini, as well as on decadent-era culture and Italian cinema. With Jon Snyder and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, she recently co-edited a special issue of California Italian Studies on "The Sacred in Italian Culture" (2015).
She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism," an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term "mystic without God" in the works of Gabriele d'Annununzio and Paul Valéry.
In Spring 2009, she was organizer of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies (CICIS) Annual Conference, held at the Stanford Humanities Center; she is currently the organizer of the upcoming CICIS 2019 conference, also to be held at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was also organizer of the interdisciplinary conference on Language, Literature, and Mysticism held at the Stanford Humanities Center on 15 and 16 October 2010.
She is currently working on a new book entitled Lazarus' Silence that explores visions of the afterlife and visits to the underworld in modern literature and culture, as a window toward our changing attitudes toward death, accepting our mortality, and accompanying the dying.
