School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 61-80 of 211 Results
-
Christian Figueroa
Undergraduate, History
BioChristian Figueroa is a political communications professional based in Southern California.
He is currently a senior communications aide at Derek Tran for Congress, one of the most competitive House races in the 2026 midterm elections, and previously held roles with U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.
Aside from his day job, Christian is a passionate advocate for progressive policies in his community, serving on the executive board of the California Democratic Party. In 2024, he was one of the youngest delegates to represent California at the Democratic National Convention.
Christian studies history at Stanford University, specializing in early colonial America. He enjoys hiking, traveling, and watching documentaries in his free time. -
Paula Findlen
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.
My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.
Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand. -
Estelle Freedman
Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI continue to study the history sexual violence, focusing on of oral history testimony from the twentieth century.
-
Jonathan Gienapp
Professor of History and of Law
BioJonathan Gienapp is Professor of History and Professor of Law. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation's early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.
His first book, *The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era* (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018.
His second book, *Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique* (Yale University Press, 2024), critiques originalism's engagement with history. It argues that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists' unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution and its original meaning and thereby the foundation of the theory itself. He wrote about the book's themes in connection with the current Supreme Court. The book won the 2025 Order of the Coif Book Award from the Association of American Law Schools, was longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, and was named a History Today Book of the Year for 2024. It has been reviewed in several high-profile venues, including The Washington Post and The Nation.
Gienapp's next book is on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, currently entitled "We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood." It tells the story of the Preamble's early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance as a way of exploring how constitutional thinking changed across American history.
Gienapp has also published a range of articles, book chapters, and essays on early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, modern constitutional interpretation, and the study of the history of ideas.
He is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice and has contributed to a number of amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal of American Constitutional History where he serves as a senior editorial advisor. He is also a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative and a charter member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy.
In addition to his scholarship, Gienapp has been widely recognized for his teaching. At Stanford, he has been awarded the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching (the university's highest teaching award), the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences in the area of First Years of Teaching. Beyond Stanford, he has been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. -
Fiona Griffiths
Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies and of German Studies
BioFiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). Griffiths is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life,The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007); she is co-editor (with Kathryn Starkey) of Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) and (with Julie Hotchin) of Partners in Spirit: Men, Women, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, Church History, the Journal of Medieval History, postmedieval, and Viator. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). Griffiths is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
-
Stephen Haber
A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Economics
BioStephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy).
Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals.
He is the author of five books and the editor of six more. Haber’s most recent books include Fragile by Design with Charles Calomiris (Princeton University Press), which examines how governments and industry incumbents often craft banking regulatory policies in ways that stifle competition and increase systemic risk. The Battle Over Patents (Oxford University Press), a volume edited with Naomi Lamoreaux, documents the development of US-style patent systems and the political fights that have shaped them.
His latest project focuses on a long-standing puzzle in the social sciences: why are prosperous democracies not randomly distributed across the planet, but rather, are geographically clustered? Haber and his coauthors answer this question by using geospatial tools to simulate the ecological conditions that shaped pre-industrial food production and trade. They then employ machine learning methods to elucidate the relationship between ecological conditions and the levels of economic development that emerged across the globe over the past three centuries.
Haber holds a Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has been on the Stanford faculty since 1987.
From 1995 to 1998, he served as associate dean for the social sciences and director of Graduate Studies of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He is among Stanford’s most distinguished teachers, having been awarded every teaching prize Stanford has to offer. -
Gabrielle Hecht
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, History
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. She is also Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.
Please note that Professor Hecht is no longer accepting graduate students.
Hecht's current research explores the inside-out Earth and its wastes in order to reveal the hidden costs of energy waste, with research sites in the Arctic, the Andes, southern Africa, and west Africa. Her 2023 book, *Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures,* received two 2024 PROSE Awards (for Excellence in Social Science and for Government and Politics) from the Association of American Publishers. It also received the 2024 E. Ohnuki Tierney award in Historical Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, the 2024 Best Book Award from the African Studies Association, 3rd place for the Victor Turner Award in Ethnographic Writing, and a finalist for the Fleck prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.
Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Power in the Anthropocene," "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She supervises dissertations in science and technology studies (STS), transnational history, and African studies. Her undergraduate course in "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age" was built in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA).
Hecht’s 2012 book *Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade* offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as *Uranium Africain, une histoire globale* (Le Seuil 2016). Her first book, *The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity* (1998/ 2nd ed 2009), explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology, and nuclear culture in reactor operations. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology, and has appeared in French as *Le rayonnement de la France: Énergie nucléaire et identité nationale après la seconde guerre mondiale* (2004/ 2nd ed. 2014).
Her affiliations at Stanford include the Center for African Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Center for Global Ethnography, the Program on Urban Studies, and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Before returning to Stanford in 2017, Hecht taught in the University of Michigan’s History department for 18 years, where she helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center.
Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others.
