School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 901-1,000 of 1,364 Results
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Samuel Page
Ph.D. Student in Slavic Languages and Literatures, admitted Autumn 2021
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEastern European literature; Eastern European religions; literary theory.
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David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Rights, Social Justice, Ethics, Race and Ethnicity
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Hyun Suk Park 朴賢淑 (she/her)
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioMy primary field of research is Korean literature and culture from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. As a scholar of Korean literature both in Korean and literary Sinitic (hanmun 漢文) by training, my research is deeply engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition. My research interests include the intersections between literature and performance, the history of gender and sexuality, the comparative history of slavery, and the cultural history of natural disasters in early modern East Asia and beyond.
My first book manuscript, Precarious Spectacle: Martial Courtesans, State Slavery, and the Ritual Production of Royal Authority in Chosŏn Korea (forthcoming; Harvard University Asia Center, 2027), explores the cultural production of government courtesans (kwan’gi 官妓) at the nexus of the studies of slavery, gender, and performance in Korean literature. In this work, I illuminate how the spectacular performances of courtesans, offered in state events, were involved in the constitution and reproduction of state power of Chosŏn. I also examine how courtesan performances represent state power as multivalent and unstable through the frequent incorporation of heterogeneous elements, as exemplified by martial entertainment offered by cross-dressing courtesans.
I am currently in the process of designing a new research project that explores the same-sex intimacy created by the practice of letter writing between the literati of Chosŏn and Qing outside of diplomatic venues. I am also developing a long-term research project in environmental humanities that focuses on climate disasters in seventeenth-century East Asia and explores the new methodologies of writing a literary and cultural history that considers climate as an actant.
Before joining Stanford in 2025, I have taught at UCLA (2018–2025), Seoul National University (2016–2018), and UC Berkeley (2013–2016). -
Grant Parker
Associate Professor of Classics, of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioGrant Parker joined Stanford in 2006, having taught previously at Duke University. He has long researched and taught Latin literature and Roman imperial culture, e.g. The Making of Roman India (2008). Other publications include The Agony of Asar: a former slave's defence of slavery, 1742 (2001) and, as editor, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (2017). Since 2025 he has also taught African Studies in the newly constituted Department of African and African American Studies. As a comparative global humanist, his interest in monuments, collective memory and their media is expressed by several articles on obelisks and statues. Another ongoing theme is enslavement and its aftermaths, ancient and modern. Current work engages monument-mindedness in Southern Africa as well as the global reception of Virgil's poetry. His many roles on campus have included the Stanford Archaeology Center, the Center for African Studies, and Residential Education.
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Patricia Parker
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, English
BioPatricia Parker received her M.A. in English at the University of Toronto and taught for three years in Tanzania, whose President Julius Nyerere also translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili. After teaching at the University of East Africa, she completed her Ph.D. at Yale, in Comparative Literature, and taught for 11 years at the University of Toronto. First invited to Stanford as a Visiting Professor in 1986, she came to Stanford permanently in 1988 as a Professor in both English and Comparative Literature. She has also taught as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of the core faculty at the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University, 1998). She is the author of four books (Inescapable Romance, a study of romance from Ariosto to Wallace Stevens; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; Shakespeare from the Margins; and Shakespearean Intersections) and co-editor of five collections of essays on criticism, theory, and cultural studies, including Shakespeare and the Question of Theory and Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. She has lectured widely in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and other parts of the world, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other universities; as Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, Shakespeare's Birthday lecturer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Northrop Frye Professor lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Paul Gottschalk lecturer at Cornell University; and has served on the Advisory Board of the English Institute. In 2003-4, she organized an international conference and public festival at Stanford devoted to “Shakespeare in Asia.” She has also worked with students to create performance-based programs in the community. She taught courses on Shakespeare (including Global Shakespeares), the Bible and Literature, Epic and Empire and other topics. In addition to books-in-progress on Shakespeare, rhetoric, race, and gender, she is the General Editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, which will be released online as a global reference work free to anyone in the world with access to the internet.
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Antonia Michelle Rosen Peacocke
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
BioAntonia Peacocke works on philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics, including philosophy of literature. As of December 2025, her monograph Mental Means is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Before coming to Stanford, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.
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Michael Penn
Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics
BioMichael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies, is a specialist in the history of early Christianity with a particular focus on middle eastern Christians who wrote in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac.
Professor Penn’s first book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning.
Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration that uses recent advances in the computerized analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of Syriac Christianity and the manuscripts they produced.
Before joining Stanford, Professor Penn was on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has additional experience as a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. Professor Penn has also held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA.
Ph.D. (Religion) Duke University (1999)
A.B. (Molecular Biology) Princeton University (1993) -
Bissera Pentcheva
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics
BioBissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics, phenomenology, and acoustics. Her most recent book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press 2017) explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. She has also edited, Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics and Ritual (Ashgate, 2017). Pentcheva has published another two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships among them: J. S Guggenheim, American Academy of Rome, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of Classical Arabic, Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Onassis Foundation (Greece), Dumbarton Oaks, and Columbia University's Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship. Her work has been published at the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Convivium.
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Peggy Phelan
Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts and Professor of English
BioPeggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005).
She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. She has written about Samuel Beckett for the PMLA and for The National Gallery of Ireland. She has also written about Robert Frost, Michael and Paris Jackson, Olran, Marina Abramovic, Dziga Vertov and a wide range of artists working in photography, dance, architecture, film, video, music, and poetry. She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President and Treasurer of Performance Studies International, the primary professional organization in her field. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She chaired the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and the Drama Department at Stanford University. -
Patrick Phillips
Eavan Boland Professor
BioPatrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of four poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Song of the Closing Doors, published in 2022. Phillips has received support from the Guggenheim Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and the Carnegie Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, and the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America. He is the Eavan Boland Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford.
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Paul Phillips
Professor (Teaching) of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHave recorded music by Adolphus Hailstork with Stanford Philharmonia, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, and guest artists for inclusion on a commercial recording with a projected completion date in 2025.
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Robert Podesva
Associate Professor of Linguistics
BioI am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. I hold degrees from Stanford University (PhD, MA) and Cornell University (BA) have been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. My research examines the social significance of variation in the domains of segmental phonetics, prosody, and voice quality. I have a particular interest in how phonetic resources participate in the construction of identity, most notably gender, sexuality, race, and their intersections. My latest projects focus on the social meaning of non-modal voice qualities in interactional contexts and sociolinguistic variation in inland California and Washington, DC. I have co-edited Research Methods in Linguistics (with Devyani Sharma), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (with Kathryn Cambpell-Kibler, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong), and a special issue of American Speech on sociophonetics and sexuality (with Penelope Eckert). I live in San Francisco.
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Edward Porter
Lecturer, English
BioEdward Porter’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Colorado Review, Catamaran, Barrelhouse, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. A native of New York City, he earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD from the University of Houston, and has been awarded fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the MacDowell Colony, and Stanford University, where he was recently a Stegner Fellow. He lives in Oakland.
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Steven Press
Associate Professor of History
BioSteven Press is an Associate Professor of History and an affiliated member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for African Studies, and the Stanford Center for Law and History.
Press' first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa (published Spring 2017 with Harvard University Press), received the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.
Press' second book, Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa, appeared in 2021 with Harvard University Press. It received the German Studies Association's Barclay Book Prize and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Title.
In an article in the Journal of Modern History, Press explored the exchanges between Germany, China, and Cuba that led to the USA's lease for Guantanamo Bay in 1903. His article on post-Napoleonic European nationalism appeared in Central European History, as did a more recent article about Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik.
Press graduated with a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt before coming to Stanford. His research interests include European sovereignty, international relations, and commodity networks. -
Robert N. Proctor
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTobacco and cigarette design; human origins and evolution; changing concepts of health and disease; medical history and medical politics
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Sarah Prodan
Assistant Professor of French and Italian
BioSarah Prodan is an Italianist, early modernist, and Michelangelo scholar whose research and teaching span literature, cultural history, religion, art, and intellectual history. Her work centers on Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries while pursuing broader questions about spirituality and religious experience, human nature and selfhood, perception and knowledge, creativity, and the ways individuals understand and fashion themselves in relation to others and the world.
Her first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association. Her forthcoming book, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy: Devotional Literature and the Spiritual Life in the Long Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2026), offers a thematic genealogical study of the lyric as a site of devotion in early modern Italy, examining the relationship between literary expression and religious experience and addressing the broader non-materialist, non-dualist worldview exemplified in the religious verse itself.
Her current book projects include Michelangelo and the Knowing Self, an exploration of perception, knowledge, and selfhood across Michelangelo’s textual and visual production, and Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity, a transhistorical and transcultural study of competing conceptions of the human and the enduring tension among humanity, divinity, and animality.
Across her scholarship and teaching, Prodan brings literary analysis into conversation with cultural, religious, intellectual, and art history, using the early modern period both as an object of historical inquiry and as a vantage point from which to investigate enduring questions about human experience.
Prodan is also a writer and singer-songwriter. Her creative work includes Imminence: Florence, 1494, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence, and three albums of original music. -
Shannon Pufahl
Lecturer, English
BioShannon Pufahl is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program. She teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and writing across genres. She was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where she received a Centennial award, the University's highest honor for teaching assistants. She has published essays in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the Antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. Her novel, On Swift Horses, about gambling, sex, and the post-war American West, was published in 2019 by Riverhead Books.
Shannon also holds a PhD in American Literature and Culture from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation traces the animal welfare movement in the U.S. from its origins in the 19th-century, through the intense debates about animal life, suffering, and intelligence at century's end, and into the young adult animal novels of the early 20th-century.
She is the co-coordinator of The Writer's Studio, a weekly workshop series sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She also teaches in the Stanford Arts Intensive and online in Summer Session. -
Ato Quayson
Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn addition to an interest in comparative cultural traditions of tragedy, I also have a strong interest in comparative urban studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and interdisciplinarity, among others.
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Emilee Quezada
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioEmilee Quezada is a first-year Ph.D. student in history, focusing on modern Latin American history, with an emphasis on twentieth-century Central America. Emilee is particularly interested in how student-led social movements and uprisings shaped revolutionary agendas, political transitions, migration, and transnational networks.
Prior to entering Stanford’s Ph.D. program, she earned a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley in 2024, where her research examined how a female combatant and commander in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) established political legitimacy in post-war El Salvador. -
Prof. Ilaria L.E. RAMELLI FRHistS
Affiliate, Philosophy
BioProfessor Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, FRHistS, holds two MAs, a PhD, a Doctorate h.c., a Postdoc, and various Habilitations to Ordinarius. She has been Professor of Roman History, Senior Visiting Professor (Harvard; Boston University; Columbia; Erfurt University), Full Professor of Theology and Endowed Chair (Angelicum), Humboldt Research Award Senior Fellow (Erfurt U. MWK), Professor of Theology (Durham University, Hon.), and Senior Fellow in Classics / Ancient Philosophy / Hellenic Studies / Theology and Religion (Durham U., twice; Princeton; Sacred Heart University; CEU Institute for Advanced Studies; Corpus Christi, Oxford U.; Christ Church, Oxford U.). She is also Professor of Patristics and Church History (KUL) and Senior Fellow at Bonn University, then Humboldt Research Award Return Senior Fellow, and Member, Center for the Study of Platonism, University of Cambridge (https://www.platonism.divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory).
She investigates ancient philosophy, especially Platonism and Stoicism, ancient theology (esp. Patristic Philosophy and Christian Platonism, besides Judaism and ancient 'pagan' religions), the interrelations between philosophy, theology, and science; ancient Christianity, Classics, and Late Antiquity, and has authored numerous books, articles, and reviews in leading scholarly journals and series, in these areas. Examples at https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-1479-4182
Recent books include: Allegoria (Sacred Heart University 2004), Basileus Nomos Empsykhos (Bibliopolis 2006), Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul and the Resurrection (Bompiani-Sacred Heart University 2007), The Roman Stoics (Bompiani 2008), Hierocles the Stoic (Brill-SBL 2009), Pre-Existence of Souls? (Peeters 2013), The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Brill 2013), Evagrius' Kephalaia Gnostica (Brill-SBL 2015), The Role of Religion in Shaping Narrative Forms (Mohr Siebeck 2015), Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity (OUP 2016), Evagrius between Origen, the Cappadocians, and Neoplatonism (Peeters 2017), Bardaisan of Edessa: A Reassessment (Gorgias 2009; De Gruyter 2019), A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation in Christianity from the Origins to Julian of Norwich, pref. Richard Bauckham (Cascade, Wipf & Stock 2019), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, 1: To 600 CE (co-ed., Oxford 2020), Terms for Eternity: Aiōnios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Authors (Gorgias 2007; De Gruyter 2021), Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity (OUP 2021), Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism and its Sources in Ancient and Patristic Philosophy (Peeters 2021), Lovers of the Soul, Lovers of the Body: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives from Late Antiquity (Harvard 2022), T&T Clark Handbook of the Early Church (co-ed., T&T Clark-Bloomsbury Academic 2021, 2024), The Construction of Professional Identities in Late Antiquity (co-ed.), Origen, the Philosophical Theologian: Kleine Schriften with unpublished essays (DeGruyter 2025), The Seneca–Paul Correspondence: New Research (forthc.) and Human and Divine Nous from Ancient to Renaissance Philosophy and Religion: Key Themes, Intersections, and Developments.
Her current work includes ethical intellectualism in ancient to late antique philosophy; Ammonius, Origen, and Plotinus and the negotiation of Plato's legacy; the category and the protagonists and philosophical issues of Patristic Philosophy and Christian Platonism; John 13-17 and its Patristic reception (including major themes in Patristic philosophy); the role of the rejection of philosophical enquiry (along with other factors) in the dismissal of the doctrine of apokatastasis by the "Church of the Empire" in late antiquity; and the theories of epistrophē and apokatastasis in ancient and patristic philosophy and their interrelation. -
Michael Ramsaur
Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEducation for Theatrical Lighting Design, nationally and internationally. Lighting design for Musicals.
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Vaughn Rasberry
Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
BioVaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, Race and the Totalitarian Century, questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, the defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.
His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English.
An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. -
Michael Rau
Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a live performance creator and director. I direct theater, musicals, opera, and I create digital media projects. I am always looking for new projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. I am interested in ways that technology can be used to tell stories, in virtual reality and games, and in live performance situations. I have created immersive theater pieces, and I enjoy working with new playwrights and writers to develop and shape their work.
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Rob Reich
McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Sr Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI, Professor, by courtesy, of Education, of Philosophy, of Law and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute
BioRob Reich is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology at Stanford University. In 2024-25, Rob was on public service leave as Senior Advisor to the United States Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
His scholarship in political theory engages with the work of social scientists and engineers. His newest work is on governance of frontier science and technology. His most recent books are System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, HarperCollins 2021) and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore, University of Chicago Press 2021). He has also written widely about philanthropy, including Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). His early work is focused on democracy and education, including Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has testified before Congress and written widely for the public, including for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. He was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review and at the Spencer Foundation. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and served as its inaugural board chair. -
James Reichert
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioJames Reichert is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. He has previously published In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (Stanford University Press, 2006). His forthcoming book, Literature for the Masses: Japanese Period Fiction, 1913-1941 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2025), explores popular adventure tales about premodern swordsmen. He has also written on prewar Japanese detective fiction, silent Japanese film, Edo-period books, Boys’ Love comics, and Japanese Romanticism.
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Leon Reilly
Undergraduate, Mathematics
Undergraduate, PhilosophyBiohttps://leonreilly.io/
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Joan Ramon Resina
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and of Comparative Literature
BioProfessor Resina has authored thirteen books, most recently Luchino Visconti. Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. The book focuses on the director’s German Trilogy —The Damned (1969) Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). This set of films is thematically unified through the exploration of decadence, combining a stunning aesthetic with philosophical implications. The book traces the philosophical themes, relating them to dominant currents of thought and sensibility in the periods under representation.
Resina is also the author of The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. This book is a reflection on the political use of historical memory focusing on the case of Spain. It analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origin and transmission of political violence and its endurance in the form of “negationism”. The book engages controversial issues, such as the relation between memory and imputation, the obstacles to reconciliation, and the problems arising from the existence of not only different but also conflicting memories about the past. Another book from the same year is Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles. Toronto University Press, 2017, which received the North American Catalan Society award for best book on Catalan Studies in 2019. This book condenses Pla's 47-volume work into 11 thematic units devoted to a central aspect of Pla's oeuvre. Resina explores the modalities of Pla's writing: stylistic, phenomenological, political, his relation to language, fiction, food, and landscape, and his approach to sexuality, women, and death. It introduces the reader to the colorful world of Catalonia's greatest 20th century prose writer through the author's gaze. Pla was a privileged observer of some of the crucial events of the 20th century, but he also captured the sensual infrastructure of his own country by recording every aspect of its reality.
Previous books include Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book, Resina lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies, contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions. Another publication since joining Stanford is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image since the late 19th century through the 20th century through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period.
Resina has edited thirteen collections of essays on varied topics, most recently, What to do with ruins? Contemporary uses of ruination. Liverpool University Press, 2025. He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, and Angelaki, and has contributed to a large number of critical volumes. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Editor of Diacritics. For many years he has been a regular contributor to the Barcelona daily press. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities, and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowships, and a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Cologne. He has been distinguished with the Cross of St. George, one of the highest awards bestowed by the Government of Catalonia. -
Judith Richardson
Senior Lecturer in English
BioJudith Richardson is a senior lecturer in English and associate director for the American Studies Program. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judith began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities. The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Nancy Rico-Mineros
Master of Arts Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2024
CCRMA Student Assistant, Music
Templeton Project Assistant, MusicBioNancy Rico-Mineros is a second-year graduate student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Prior to Stanford, Nancy received a Bachelor of Music from New York University where she majored in Music Technology.
