School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,001-1,100 of 1,252 Results
-
Jie Shen 沈劼
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2021
BioJie Shen 沈劼 is a Ph.D. student in Chinese Archaeology, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. She mainly focuses on the crafting technology of bone artifacts in ancient China. Using the use-wear analysis, residue analysis, and experimental archaeology, Jie explores the variation and development of bone crafting techniques, and how the crafting industry was involved in social progress such as the formation of the early state. Also, she is interested in the religious and political meaning of animal-related artifacts, which are significant for understanding the human-animal relationship.
-
Sandra Wright Shen
Lecturer
BioSteinway Artist Sandra Wright Shen has been described as “a classical pianist of the first order.” With her passion, musicality and inspiration, she aims to move hearts and uplift spirits through music.
Sandra has performed across 16 countries in over 600 concerts. Her appearances include prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Cultural Center, Monte Carlo Opera House, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Frankfurt Cultural Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, Taiwan National Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Hong Kong City Hall, and festivals including the Granada International Music Festival, Recontres Musicales de Chaon in France, Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI, Chelsea Music Festival, MasterWorks Festival and Steinway Society Concert Series.
She has been featured as guest artist with orchestras appearances around the world displaying a broad repertoire of 26 concertos. She served as Artist-in-Residence with the Charleston Symphony during the 2017–18 season. As a chamber musician, Sandra has performed with renowned artists including Vesselin Paraschkevov (former concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic), Brinton Smith (Houston Symphony), bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, and toured Asia with cellist Nina Kotova.
Sandra received first prize from several major international piano competitions, including First Prize at the 2012 France International Piano Competition, the 1997 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, the 1996 Mieczysław Munz Piano Competition, and the 1990 Taiwan National Piano Competition.
Her recordings include a debut CD featuring Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, both released by Taiwan’s Rolling Stone Music. Her latest album, Momentum, with cellist Miriam Smith, was released on Azica Records in 2022.
Sandra is a piano lecturer at the Stanford University and the piano chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division. She has served on the faculty of the Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI Young Artists Piano Program, Masterworks Music Festival, Music@Tetauchi, and American Fine Arts Festival in Europe and others. Previous academic appointments include Southern Illinois University and frequent invitations as Distinguished Guest Faculty at Furman University. Her students have won top prizes in competitions such as the International Piano Competition of Orléans (France), Stockholm International Piano Competition, the Chopin Foundation, Young Arts and the MTAC competitions.
Sandra performed live for WCQS Radio in Asheville, filmed a four-part television series “The Movements of the Master Composers” for Hong Kong TV and "Inspiration From Above" for US Creation TV, and hosted a classical music program for Taiwan’s IC Broadcast Radio FM97.5. Mixing music and philanthropy, Sandra has given benefit concerts for disaster victims, foster children, firefighters, music education for underprivileged children and San Jose Chamber Series.
Born in Taiwan, Sandra earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in Piano Performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with legendary pianist Ann Schein. Her teachers also include Zalina Gurevich and Jörg Demus.
www.sandrashen.com -
stephanie sherriff
Lecturer
BioStephanie Sherriff is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer currently based in San Francisco, California. Their work with sound, video, and physical phenomena is ephemeral in nature and culminates as time-based installations and performances that deconstruct fragments of daily life through experimental processes. They received a BA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019. Their work has been featured both nationally and internationally at creative centers such as the Institute for Research Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), the Sfendoni Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), O. Festival, Gray Area, The Lab, Artists Television Access (ATA), and the Center for New Music (C4NM).
-
Ory Shihor
Lecturer
BioOry Shihor is an internationally acclaimed pianist and educator, serving on the piano faculty at Stanford University as Lecturer in Piano. His students have won major international competitions—including the Walter W. Naumburg International Piano Competition, Montreal International Piano Competition, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and the Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU International Piano Competition—and have gained admission to leading conservatories and universities such as Juilliard, Yale, and Curtis.
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, Mr. Shihor has been a frequent guest lecturer and master class teacher at major institutions worldwide, including the Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories, Seoul National University, National Taiwan Normal University, Northwestern University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Boston Conservatory, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Royal Northern College of Music.
Prior to joining Stanford, he served for over a decade as Professor of Piano Performance at the Colburn Conservatory, where he was also the founding dean of the Colburn Music Academy, a highly selective pre-college program for gifted young musicians. He is the co-founder of the Ory Shihor Institute, where he continues to teach advanced pianists and mentor the next generation of piano educators.
Mr. Shihor is a prizewinner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the Washington International Piano Competition, the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, and the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition. He is a Bösendorfer and Yamaha artist. -
Partha Pratim Shil
Assistant Professor of History
BioI am an historian of modern South Asia, specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century eastern India, with a developing research interest in the late eighteenth century. My work is located at the intersection of the fields of histories of state formation and labour history. I am particularly interested in the histories of government workers and how this labour history intrinsic to the state apparatus recasts our understanding of state formation.
I am currently working on the manuscript of my first book, provisionally entitled 'Sovereign Labour: Constables and Watchmen in the Making of the Modern State in India, c. 1860-1950'. This monograph is a study of police constables and village watchmen in Bengal from the promulgation of the Police Act in 1861 until the upheavals of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. It reframes the history of constables and village watchmen, usually represented as government functionaries, as the history of a distinctive form of labour.
The most important methodological innovation of this study is to bring methods from the historiography of labour in South Asia in conversation with the vast archive of the colonial police and to demonstrate how we can rewrite police history as labour history. Sovereign Labour charts the contours of the market of security labour in eastern India and locates the emergence of colonial police workforces within the rhythms of this labour market. It reveals the patterns in the history of constabulary recruitment; examines the implications of the conditions of police work for the nature of police power; delineates the internal segmentation within the world of police labour, and the defining role of caste in shaping modern policing apparatuses in colonial India; and brings out fresh evidence about the myriad modes of politics devised by police workers in this region. More broadly, my aim is to clear a conceptual ground for the study of forms of labour within the apparatuses of the modern state as well as demonstrate how the history of the labouring lives of government workers can provide a fresh entry point into the nature of the modern state in South Asia.
Before joining Stanford, I was a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. -
Gi-Wook Shin
William J. Perry Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsKorean democratization; Korean nationalism; U.S.-Korea relations; North Korean politics; reconciliation and cooperation in Northeast Asia; global talent; multiculturalism; inter-Korean relations
-
Aatika Singh
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and EthnicityCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsCaste Studies, Art History & Cultural Studies, Race Studies and Modernism
-
Leeth Singhage
Ida Fellow, Contingent
Student Wardrobe Supervisor, Contingent
Undergraduate, Management Science and Engineering
Undergraduate, Theater and Performance StudiesBioLeeth Singhage is an actor, writer, and producer from Sri Lanka, pursuing dual degrees in Management Science & Engineering (B.S.) and Theater & Performance Studies (B.A.) at Stanford. His creative work often investigates pressing current events and explores themes of identity, resilience, and cross-cultural storytelling. His writing credits include QUARANteen (2021), a verbatim-theater production on the teen experience of the COVID19 lockdowns, GROWTHesque (2022-23), a meta exploration of Sri Lanka's political and economic crisis hosted at the Edinburgh Fringe and NYC's United Solo festivals and filmed by Kehelmala Studios, Lab-Grown Meat (2023) a solo play on the incipient alt-meat industry produced at Stanford, and Yakada Yaka (2026), a full-length play on suicide currently in development in Sri Lanka and in the U.S.
Beyond appearances in his original work produced under SarongHoodie, Leeth has played lead roles across theater and screen internationally for over 10-years. Select acting credits include: "Shaan Murthy" in British TV series The Good Karma Hospital - Season 4 (2022) by Tiger Aspects Productions, "Friedrich" in the Broadway touring production of The Sound of Music (2018) by Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Really Useful Group, "Kalana" in multiple award-winning Grease Yaka Returns (2019-20) by AnandaDrama, "Ariel" in The Workshop Players' Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest (2017) by AnandaDrama, and "Peter Pan" in Peter Pan the Musical (2016) by COLD Theatre 7.
Leeth has worked in development for Academy® Award-winning filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi at Little Monster Films, for the multiple Emmy® Award-winning team at Baboon Animation, and for Sri Lankan production company, Kehelmala. Through his cross-cultural storytelling company, SarongHoodie, he aims to increase international representation of underprivileged communities in film and television. -
Genevieve Smith
Postdoctoral Scholar, Comparative Literature
BioI am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Oxford, where I studied societal impacts of artificial intelligence in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on gender. As a social scientist with a disciplinary background of science and technology studies (STS) and devleopment studies, I examine the impacts of AI on inequality and society, as well as explore more equitable and responsible paradigms for AI technologies globally. I founded the Responsible AI Initiative at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab and teach on responsible AI. I am a research affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at Cambridge University and at the Technology & Management Centre for Development at University of Oxford. Prior, I served as the Responsible AI Fellow at the United States Agency for International Development and as Interim Co-Director of the UC Berkeley AI Policy Hub.
-
Julius Smith
Professor of Music, Emeritus
BioSmith is a professor emeritus of music and (by courtesy) electrical engineering (Information Systems Lab) based at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Teaching and research pertain to music and audio applications of signal processing. Former software engineer at NeXT Computer, Inc., responsible for signal processing software pertaining to music and audio. For more, see https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/.
-
Matthew Smith
Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies
BioMatthew Wilson Smith’s interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
-
Ethan Ruijian Song
Undergraduate, Electrical Engineering
Undergraduate, MusicBioTransfer EE Student from Duke.
-
Kathryn Starkey
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of English, of History and of Comparative Literature
BioKathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of English, History, and Comparative Literature. Her work focuses primarily on medieval German literature from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and her research topics encompass visuality and materiality, object/thing studies, manuscript illustration and transmission, language, performativity, and poetics. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Palermo (2011) and Freiburg im Breisgau (2013 and 2018).
Recent book publications (since 2012) include:
* Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 800-1600, edited with Jutta Eming (Berlin/New York, 2021).
* Animals in Text and Textile. Storytelling in the Medieval World, edited with Evelin Wetter. Riggisberger Berichte, Vol. 24 (Riggisberg, Switzerland, 2019).
* Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited with Fiona Griffiths (Berlin/New York, 2018).
* Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegger Manuscript, edited and translated with Edith Wenzel, TEAMS series in bilingual medieval German texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016).
* A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s “Welscher Gast” (Notre Dame, 2013).
* Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan, edited with Jutta Eming and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame, 2012).
Professor Starkey is the PI for the Global Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/) for which she received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2018) as well as awards from the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies at Stanford (2016, 2017, 2018).
Her current research projects include a co-authored (with Fiona Griffiths) textbook for the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220).
Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -
Alice Staveley
Senior Lecturer of English
BioAlice Staveley teaches a range of courses on British modernism, contemporary British and Canadian fiction, and Virginia Woolf. She has won the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016-2017) and directs the Honors Program in English and the Digital Humanities Minor. She has taught in the Oxford tutorial system, the History and Literature concentration at Harvard University, and Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities Program (2001-2006). Research interests include: modernism; narratology; book and periodical history; women and the professions; feminist and cultural theory; and digital humanities. Her current book project examines Virginia Woolf's life as a publisher. Select publications include: Woolf’s short fictional feminist narratology; Woolf’s European reception; photography in Three Guineas; modernist marketing; and transnational archival feminisms. She co-founded and co-directs of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a critical digital archive of documents related to modernist publishing supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Roberta Bowman Denning Digital Fund for Humanities and Technologies. http://modernistarchives.com Recent digital humanities research involves quantitative analysis of modernist book-sales records.
-
Ariel Stilerman
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI study premodern Japan through its manuscripts, objects, and languages.
I advocate for a “maker mindset” in the humanities. My research is just as much about building and doing as about reading and writing. My courses involve hands-on experiences and are often co-taught with colleagues in Classics, English, Religion, History, Mechanical Engineering, or Physics.
My first book, Court Poetry and the Culture of Learning in Japan (Harvard, 2026), charts the transformation of the poetry of the imperial court into a shared language for military and priestly elites, lower-ranking warriors, and eventually urban merchants.
My second project, Meet the People Who Built Japan, investigates the emergence of a “culture of work” in early medieval manuscripts and artifacts.
I welcome inquiries from students interested in classical through early modern Japanese literature through the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as those pursuing transdisciplinary work through the program in Modern Thought and Literature, and grad makers in the humanities through Making and Creative Praxis.
More broadly, I am interested in how we engage with the world through our senses and skills, exploring fields such as the tea ceremony, psychoanalysis, woodworking, sailing, olfactory cultures, technology, and design. -
Adele Leigh Stock
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
SHI Discussion Leader, Stanford Pre-Collegiate StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsHistory of environment, religion, and technology in 20c urban Africa
-
Jeanne Su
Director of Finance and Operations, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Finance and Operations at East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC).
-
Meghan Sumner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
BioMeghan Sumner received her PhD in Linguistics at Stony Brook University. After completing her PhD, she was an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Psychology. She has been at Stanford University since 2007, where she is now an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Stanford Phonetics Lab, where she investigates variation and spoken language understanding.
Meghan’s research sits at the intersection of acoustic phonetics, language use and variation, social meaning, and cognitive psychology. She investigates attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension within and across individuals, groups, and languages, aiming to understand how different components of spoken language understanding work together. She and her students are testing the predictions of and hope to contribute to the development of a dynamic adaptive socially-anchored model of spoken language understanding. For the past twenty years, her work has focused on diverse talker and listener populations, drawing on variation to address issues in linguistics and psychology related to representation, asymmetries in memory, social effects in spoken language recognition, familiarity, experience, and categorization.
She is currently a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, working with public institutions and advocacy groups to apply language-based social science methods to increase protections for children living with domestic violence. -
Chao Sun
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, by courtesy, of Linguistics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy primary research interest is in Chinese linguistics studying how linguistic forms and meanings vary systematically in different socio-cultural contexts in modern Chinese languages. My other works concern with morphosyntactic changes in the history of Chinese and pedagogical grammar in teaching Chinese as Second Language.
-
C. Kwang Sung, MD, MS
Associate Professor of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery (OHNS) and, by courtesy, of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsLaryngology
Otolaryngology
Professional voice -
Lisa Surwillo
Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioProfessor Surwillo teaches courses on Iberian literature, with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century. Her research addresses the questions of property, empire, race and personhood as they are manifested by literary works, especially dramatic literature, dealing with colonial slavery, abolition and Spanish citizenship. Surwillo is the author of Monsters by Trade (Stanford 2014), a study of slave traders in Spanish literature and the role of these colonial mediators in the development of modern Spain. She is also the author of The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (Toronto 2007), an analysis of the development of copyright and authorship in nineteenth-century Spain and the impact of intellectual property on theater. She is currently completing two books: the first is a study of freedom petitions by enslaved Afro-Cuban women during the 1870s and the second is a co-authored study, with Martín Rodrigo, of a major Cuban financier and Catalan real estate magnate.
-
Melinda Takeuchi
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly Interestshorse culture of Japan.
-
Elizabeth Tallent
Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities, Emerita
BioElizabeth Tallent previously taught literature and creative writing at the University of California at Irvine, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of a novel, Museum Pieces, and three collections of short stories, In Constant Flight, Time with Children, and Honey, and a study of John Updike's fiction, Married Men and Magic Tricks. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Grand Street, The Paris Review, and The Threepenny Review, and in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award collections. Her story "Tabriz" received 2008 Pushcart Prize Award. In 2007 she was awarded Stanford's Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and in 2008 she received the Northern California Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa's Excellence in Teaching Award, recognizing "the extraordinary gifts, diligence, and amplitude of spirit that mark the best in teaching." In 2009 she was honored with Stanford's Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching." Her short story "Never Come Back" appeared in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011.
-
Merve Tekgürler
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Masters Student in Symbolic Systems, admitted Autumn 2023BioMerve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.
Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.
As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Merve’s research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI in Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World, which they started with Adrien Zakar in Winter 2020. They also contributed to their advisor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Mapping Ottoman Epirus project, building a placenames dataset from an Ottoman transportation map and developing a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with exaggerated elevation data.
Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop (AY 2021-22 & 2022-23). They also worked as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA from Spring 2021 to Fall 2022. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects. -
Adam Tobin
Senior Lecturer of Art and Art History
BioAdam Tobin is a screenwriter teaching courses in short and feature film writing, TV pilots, script analysis, fiction film production, and adaptation. He created the half-hour comedy series About a Girl and the reality series Best Friend's Date for Viacom's The-N network (now TeenNick), won an Emmy Award for Discovery Channel’s Cash Cab, and has written for ABC, ESPN, and the National Basketball Association. He was a story analyst for Jim Henson Pictures and has taught story and pitching seminars at Dreamworks Animation, Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios, and Aardman Animations. He also teaches in the Arts Intensive program and offers an Improvisationally Speaking course in Stanford Continuing Studies.
His play She Persisted: The Musical, was a New York Times Critic's Pick and winner of the Off-Broadway Alliance award for Best Family Show. His new musical The Pigeon Gets a Big Time Holiday Extavaganza, co-written with and based on the characters of Mo Willems, bestselling author of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the Elephant & Piggie books, will open in six cities in November 2025.
