School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 901-1,000 of 1,551 Results
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Fernando Martinez Periset
Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature, admitted Autumn 2022
BioHello, this is Fernando. Thanks for stopping by! Before joining Stanford's department of Comparative Literature as a doctoral student in 2022, I trained as a comparatist at Durham, the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. My main supervisor here at Stanford is Roland Greene.
In terms of research interests, the main issue I keep coming back to (which partly derives from my experiences studying in different countries) is how and why intercultural encounters function as driving forces of creative production in its different forms. With a focus on big-picture thinking and global perspectives in the study of cultural history, I see such creative practices at work in the overlaps among literature, art history and philosophy, particularly continental philosophy. More precisely, I believe I am drawn to two broad questions: how classical theories of ethics and subjectivity (like Stoicism and Epicureanism) produced changes in societal values within Early Modern culture, and how the Renaissance, in turn, shaped attitudes to selfhood in later movements, especially Romanticism. From the standpoint of transhistorical reception studies, I would like to explore the inner lives of people from the past as a way of finding questions that speak to our own present. That is why specific topics of interest include the intersections of literary forms with the history of emotions, the history of ethics, cognitive anthropology, psychology, migrations, intellectual history and religion. I like poetry (both studying it and writing it), the epic tradition as well as theatre. Beyond French, Latin, Spanish and English, I am expanding into Portuguese and Arabic.
I am currently developing a research project on Milton and the classical tradition.
Some of my favourite authors include figures from Classical Antiquity and Early Modernity, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Racine, Seneca, Lucretius, Virgil, Homer, Quevedo, but also more recent figures whose work intervenes in and develops preexisting structures of ethics and emotions. I look forward to discovering new, exciting figures.
I would be delighted to hear from students and researchers (from Stanford and beyond!) with whom I could share intellectual interests, so please feel free to drop me a line. -
Yoshiko Matsumoto
Yamato Ichihashi Chair of Japanese History and Civilization and Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsBased on in-depth analyses of Japanese with a cross-linguistic perspective, my research emphasizes the importance of linguistic and extralinguistic context in understanding the structure, meaning and use of language. I have worked on the pragmatics of linguistic constructions (e.g. frame semantics of noun-modifying construction, reference, honorifics, discourse markers) and sociocultural aspects of discourse (e.g. politeness theories, speech acts, bilingualism, intersection of language, gender and age, ideology, and identity reflected in Japanese as a second language). Topics of my current research center around conversational narratives especially of older adults and disaster survivors – (re)framing of narratives, ordinariness, stances taken by participants, integration of pragmatic factors in Construction Grammar, and typology and functions of noun-modifying constructions.
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Jody Maxmin
Associate Professor of Art and Art History and of Classics
BioProf. Maxmin's research includes Greek painting and sculpture, archaic Greek Art, the Art and Culture of 5th century Athens, classical influence on later art, athletics in ancient Greece.
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Adrienne Mayor
Affiliate, Classics
Visiting Scholar, ClassicsBioAdrienne Mayor has been a research scholar in the Classics Department and History and Philosophy of Science Program at Stanford University since 2006. Her book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explores the timeless quest for artificial life, to show how automatons, self-moving devices, human enhancements, and Artificial Intelligence were imagined in antiquity. Other books include Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws; Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World; The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World; The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myths in Greek and Roman Times; and The Poison King: Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (National Book Award finalist).
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Jay McClelland
Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Psychology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics and of Computer Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research addresses topics in perception and decision making; learning and memory; language and reading; semantic cognition; and cognitive development. I view cognition as emerging from distributed processing activity of neural populations, with learning occurring through the adaptation of connections among neurons. A new focus of research in the laboratory is mathematical cognition and reasoning in humans and contemporary AI systems based on neural networks.
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Mark McGurl
Albert Guérard Professor of Literature
BioMark McGurl's scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011. His most recent book, Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon (Verso 2021), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
McGurl’s first book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics.
McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books before earning his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins. He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center. -
Alison McQueen
Associate Professor of Political Science and, by courtesy, of History
BioAlison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.
McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought. -
Christian V. Mejia
Lecturer
BioChristian Mejia (he/they) believes that light has the ability to transport us to a moment in time and cradle us within a particular place. Light affects our mood, informs our emotional landscape, and enhances the everyday moments that make up our lives. The right light can tell a story that goes beyond words.
Christian’s approach to design seeks to create environments that ask people to lean into and learn something about our shared humanity. His design practice includes live performance, architectural lighting, and immersive entertainment. His work has been seen on stages and in built environments around the world. Some of his most cherished theatrical collaborations include the Geffen Playhouse (Los Angeles), Fountain Theatre (Los Angeles), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), ACT (San Francisco), and New Conservatory Theatre Center (San Francisco). His architectural lighting design practice has included work with Universal Creative, Lincoln Center NYC, and global Soho House properties.
Christian received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. See a selection of his work at christianvmejia.com. -
Jamie Meltzer
Professor of Art and Art History
BioProfessor Jamie Meltzer teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film. His feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. Shifted Landscapes, a documentary feature in production, presents a mosaic of stories depicting the environmental, cultural, and psychological landscapes of California amidst the ongoing climate crisis. His short documentary, not even for a moment do things stand still, premiered at SXSW in March 2022, winning a Special Jury Mention in Visual Reflection. The film provides an observational glimpse into a COVID-19 art installation, dropping into intimate moments of people honoring their loved ones, and interrogating the role of mourning and closure during an unfolding tragedy. It was published as a New York Times Op-Doc in April 2022. Huntsville Station, a short documentary film directed with Chris Filippone, was featured as a New York Times Op-Docs and premiered at Berlinale and SXSW in 2020. The film observes the scene at a bus station - where dozens of inmates just released on parole take in their first moments of freedom before taking the bus home. True Conviction (broadcast on Independent Lens in May 2018), a co-production of ITVS and the recipient of a Sundance Institute grant and a MacArthur grant, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Mention in the Best Documentary Feature category. Informant (2012), about a revolutionary activist turned FBI informant, was released in theaters in the US and Canada in Fall 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith. Previous films include: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broadcast, 2007), an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction.
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Jisha Menon
Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies, Director of Stanford Global Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioJisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies. She serves as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical theory and performance studies; law and humanities; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her current research project, Law, Affect, and the Performance of Personhood, explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. The book argues that attending to the fictive constitution of the person within the law allows us to highlight the artifice, indeed, the aesthetics that are central to jurisprudence. Her four books explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her newest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, the book delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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Richard Meyer
Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History
BioAreas of Specialization:
20th-century American art and visual culture -
Ana Raquel Minian
Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resources Studies
BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.
Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s work in immigration and ethnic history; the Western Association of Women Historians’ Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best monograph in the field of history by a member; the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for best book in humanist sociology; and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history by the Organization of American Historians and received an honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award given to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.
Minian's second book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention (Viking Press, forthcoming, April 2024) reveals the history of the immigrant detention system from its inception in the 1800s to the present. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, the book gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these “black sites” exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn’t have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.
Additionally, Minian has published articles in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.
In 2020, Minian was awarded with the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Minian's third book project, "No Man’s Lands: A New History of Immigration Restriction," examines how during the late Cold War and its aftermath, U.S. officials created new spaces and territories designed to prevent Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants from entering the United States. Rather than a thought-out and coherent project, these various spatial enterprises were designed haphazardly in response to particular incidents and migrations. -
Tatiana Monserrat Miranda-Benavides
Ph.D. Student in Iberian & Latin American Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
BioTatiana Monserrat Miranda-Benavides studies literature and philosophy, with a focus on modern Latin American literature and early modern Iberian texts. She approaches these fields through existentialist frameworks to examine questions of subjectivity and temporality.
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Mercedes Montemayor Elosua
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
BioMercedes Montemayor is a Mexican composer, multidisciplinary artist, and doctor of musical arts candidate at Stanford University. Her works manifest as electronic and electroacoustic music, sound Art, sound installation, and performance Art. She composes multichannel pieces for the stage and the listening room at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), from 3-7th order ambisonics. Also a film lover, she actively participates in the sound design and compositions of short films— and is now entering the world of scoring the feature film with LOUWRIEN WIJERS: from Competition to Compassion (2025). Her career launched with her collaboration with Mexican textile artist Miriam Medrez, in her intermedia installation Jardín Onírico (2022), followed by an internship at an Architectural Acoustics firm, and a performance in Mutek (2023) in Museo Anahuacall, in Mexico City with her debut album Volumina (2023).She studied Audio Engineering at Tecnológico De Monterrey and is in love with the process of mixing and mastering her work. Recently she's been reading Kierkegaard which is a considerable influence in her upcoming works, and continues to experiment with space to voice her experience as an experiencer.
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Yumi Moon
Associate Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI joined the department in 2006 after I completed my dissertation on the last phase of Korean reformist movements and the Japanese colonization of Korea between 1896 and 1910. In my dissertation, I revisited the identity of the pro-Japanese collaborators, called the Ilchinhoe, and highlighted the tensions between their populist orientation and the state-centered approach of the Japanese colonizers. Examining the Ilchinhoe’s reformist orientation and their dissolution by the Japanese authority led me to question what it meant to be collaborators during the period and what their tragic history tells us about empire as a political entity. I am currently working on a book manuscript centered on the theme of collaboration and empire, notably in relation to the recent revisionist assessments of empire. My next research will extend to the colonial period of Korea after the annexation and will examine what constituted colonial modernity in people’s everyday lives and whether the particulars of modernity were different in colonial and non-colonial situations. To explore these questions, I plan to look at the history of movie theaters in East Asia between 1890 and 1945, a subject which will allow me to study the interactions between the colonial authority, capitalists and consumers, as well as to look at the circulation of movies as consumed texts.
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Joshua Moreno
Lecturer
BioJoshua Moreno’s work examines the overlapping relationship between the natural and human-made environment and highlights patterns and systems of efficiency that exist within them. Through installation, drawing, and film, he re-evaluates the everyday spaces and objects that surround us, with added attention to elemental phenomena.
www.joshuamoreno.com -
Franco Moretti
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor, Emeritus
BioAuthor of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), The Bourgeois (2013), and Distant Reading (2013). Chief editor of The Novel (2006). Has founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Writes often for New Left Review, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
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Ian Morris
Jean and Rebecca Willard Endowed Professor of Classics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsUsing long-term history to identify the big trends that have shaped society across the last 100,000 years, and analyzing how those trends might play out in the future.
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Paula M. L. Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioMoya is currently the Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is on leave for AY 2025-2026.
She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).
Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.
At Stanford, Moya has served as the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).
Moya was a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.
Moya has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Ford Foundation posdoctoral fellow. She has also been the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. -
Michaela Mross
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
BioMichaela Mross specializes in Japanese Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on Sōtō Zen, Buddhist rituals, sacred music, as well as manuscript and print culture in premodern Japan. She has written numerous articles on kōshiki 講式 (Buddhist ceremonials) and co-edited a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on kōshiki. Her first book, Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of Kōshiki in Japanese Sōtō Zen, is forthcoming with the Kuroda Series of University of Hawai’i Press. She is currently working on a monograph on eisanka 詠讃歌 (Buddhist hymns) and lay Buddhist choirs in contemporary Zen Buddhism. This project will showcase how music played a vital role in the modernization of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism in the last seventy years.
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Thomas Mullaney
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.
His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. -
Ben Mylius
Postdoctoral Scholar, Philosophy
Current Research and Scholarly Interestsclimate change, culture and imagination
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Carolyn Springer
Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Emerita
BioProfessor Carolyn Springer came to Stanford in 1985 after receiving a Ph.D. in Italian language and literature from Yale University. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies / Villa I Tatti, the Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her research has focused primarily on Renaissance and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. She has published articles and reviews in Annali d’italianistica, Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, GRADIVA: International Journal of Literature, The International Journal of the Humanities, Italian Quarterly, The Italianist, Italica (Journal of the American Association of Italian Studies), Modern Language Studies, NEMLA Italian Studies, Quaderni d’italianistica, Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Stanford Italian Review, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, Woman’s Art Journal, The Wordsworth Circle, and Yale Italian Studies. Professor Springer’s books include The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1987; reprinted in paperback, 2010); Immagini del Novecento italiano (Macmillan, coeditors Pietro Frassica and Giovanni Pacchiano); and History and Memory in European Romanticism (special issue of Stanford Literature Review). Her latest book, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, appeared in 2010 with University of Toronto Press (reprinted in paperback, 2013).
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Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioAshkan Nazari
M.A. Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran
A Kurdish-Iranian musician and researcher, Ashkan is currently an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford. He holds a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Tehran and a master's in ethnomusicology from Tehran University of Art.
Ashkan's more than 15-year-long research career has centred upon Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. The core area he is pursuing at Stanford covers the intersections between music, on the one hand, and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam and Kurdish identity, on the other. His interest also includes the development of ethnographic studies of the relationship existing between maqām as a cultural-musical concept, with ethnicity, racism and colonialism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with three titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music, the Anthropological Aspects of Maqām Music of Iraqi Kurdistan, with the latter set to be released soon. Many of his numerous articles have additionally appeared across prestigious Iranian journals, others presented at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first-ever philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan also taught Iranian music theory and Iranian ensembles, while instructing setār performance and analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively.
