School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 51-60 of 72 Results

  • Herman Winick

    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.

  • Terry Winograd

    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.

  • Tom Winterbottom

    Tom Winterbottom

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioI teach Spanish for the Stanford Language Center in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages and I also teach classes for the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Currently I teach a wide range of first- and second-year Spanish classes and lead courses on 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian cultural history. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford in 2015 in Iberian and Latin American Cultures and have published a cultural history of Rio de Janeiro (2016) as well as book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, essays, and journalism. In recent years, I've also taught Portuguese language as well courses on modern Latin American literature and cinema.

  • Caroline Winterer

    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 is currently writing a book on the history of deep time in America, to be published by Princeton University Press.

    She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, the history of science, and the trans-Atlantic contexts of American thought.

    She is the author of five books, including most recently Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era (Chicago, 2020), edited with her Stanford colleague Karen Wigen. Assembling a group of distinguished historians, cartographers, and art historians, the book shows how maps around the world for the last 500 years have ingeniously handled time in the spatial medium of maps.

    Her book American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016), showed how early Americans grappled with the promises of the Enlightenment – how they used new questions about the plants, animals, rocks, politics, religions and peoples of the New World to imagine a new relationship between the present and the past, and to spur far-flung conversations about a better future for all of humanity. Earlier books and articles have explored America's long tradition of looking at the ancient classical world for political, artistic, and cultural inspiration. She received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution for mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/dear-sir-ben-franklin-would-like-to-add-you-to-his-network-180947639/.

    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.

  • Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH

    Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH

    Richard E. Behrman, MD, Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Health Policy and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
    On Leave from 02/01/2024 To 12/20/2024

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHe is a health policy and outcomes researcher whose work has focused on children's health; health-outcomes disparities by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; the interaction of genetics and the environment as these factors influence child and maternal health; and the impact of medical technology on disparities in health outcomes.

  • Laura Wittman

    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.

  • Frank Wolak

    Frank Wolak

    Holbrook Working Professor of Price Theory and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Precourt Institute for Energy

    BioFrank A. Wolak is the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics and the Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. His research and teaching focuses on design, performance, and monitoring of energy and environmental markets. He served as Chair of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator and was a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee (EMAC) for California’s Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances.

  • Mikael Wolfe

    Mikael Wolfe

    Associate Professor of History

    BioI am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.

    I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see teaching tab to the right. I am accepting graduate students to work under me, but before contacting me, please become familiar with my work. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your own research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.)

    My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. In so doing, it demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement the latter, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.

    The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?

    To answer this global question, my book integrates environmental and technological history along with social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable.

    My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather shapes the process of social revolution across Cuba’s varied climates and environments. In my new book project, Rebellious Climates: How Extreme Weather Shaped the Cuban Revolutions, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians.

  • Tobias Wolff

    Tobias Wolff

    Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus

    BioTobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award - both for excellence in the short story - the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and literary journals.