School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,401-1,500 of 1,584 Results
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Elaine Treharne
Roberta Bowman Denning Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioI’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the history of writing systems. I’m currently completing new research on Neil Ripley Ker, his Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, and his methods as a manuscript scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012). Also recently published is the two part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.
I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). Other projects include “Digital Ker”—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s. I am also PI of CyberText Technologies (https://digitalker.stanford.edu); on a project investigating the complex subject of personal archives—SOPES; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include a regular Collegium: the first, on “Distortion” was published as Textual Distortion in 2017; the fourth was published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age in 2020. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0 https://em1060.stanford.edu/). With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies; and with Thomas Mullaney and Kathryn Starkey, I co-direct SILICON (https://silicon.stanford.edu/).
In 2024-2025, I’m delighted to be a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, developing archival tools and guidelines. I’m also the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI). I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. -
Jennifer Trimble
Associate Professor of Classics
BioJennifer Trimble works on the visual and material culture of the Roman Empire, with interests in portraits and replication, the visual culture of Roman slavery, comparative urbanism, and ancient mapping. Her book on Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explores the role of visual sameness in constructing public identity and articulating empire and place. Trimble was co-director of the IRC-Oxford-Stanford excavations in the Roman Forum (now being prepared for publication), focused on the interactions of commercial, religious and monumental space. She also co-directed Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, a collaboration between computer scientists and archaeologists to help reassemble a fragmentary ancient map of the city of Rome.
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Nancy de Wit
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art, Emerita
BioNancy J. Troy is Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art and Chair of the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University. In addition to The De Stijl Environment (MIT Press, 1983), she is the author of Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (Yale University Press, 1991), Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion(MIT Press, 2003), and, most recently, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian(University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this book about Mondrian after his death in 1944, Troy examines the trajectories of the artist's work and legacy as they circulated through the realms of elite and popular culture, and she explores the ways in which the dominant historical narrative of Mondrian and his work has been shaped by art-market forces.
Professor Troy received her PhD from Yale University in 1979, and thereafter taught at The Johns Hopkins University (1979-83), Northwestern University (1983-93), and the University of Southern California (1994-2010). A past president of the National Committee for the History of Art, she was Editor-in-Chief of the flagship art history journal, The Art Bulletin, from 1994 to 1997. She has been awarded many fellowships, most notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
At Stanford, Professor Troy teaches courses on modern European and American art, architecture and design; cubism; modern art and fashion; art, business and the law; the art market, and topics generated by the collections and exhibitions of the Cantor Arts Center and the Art and Architecture Library. -
Fred Turner
Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Art and Art History and of History
BioFred Turner’s research and teaching focus on media technology and cultural change. He is especially interested in the ways that emerging media have helped shape American life since World War II.
Turner is the author of five books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory; Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); and L'Usage de l'Art: de Burning Man à Facebook, art, technologie et management dans la Silicon Valley. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries. They are available here: fredturner.stanford.edu/essays/.
Turner’s research has received a number of academic awards and has been featured in publications ranging from Science and the New York Times to Ten Zen Monkeys. It has also been widely translated.
Turner is also the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a freelance journalist for ten years and he continues to write for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe, including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University. -
Jun Uchida
Asian Cultures and Society Professor and Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current book project examines the diasporic history of Ōmi shōnin (merchant). Often compared to overseas Chinese and Jewish merchants, merchants of Ōmi (present-day Shiga prefecture) are famous for peddling textiles and other goods across the early modern Japanese archipelago. My aim is to trace their activities into the global age of capital and empire, from cotton trade and manufacturing in China to retail commerce in Korea and Manchuria, and immigration to North America.
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Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Master of Fine Arts Student, Art Practice
HIA Grad Mentor, Stanford Arts InstituteBioChukwudubem Ukaigwe is an artist, curator, and writer based out of Canada. Exercising material as an experimental device for cross-examining plural themes, his interdisciplinary practice is an inquiry into semiotic dissonance. Chukwudubem participates in the creation of immersive audiovisual scapes for fecund contemplation, bringing to centre facets of everyday life to generate active conceptual trans-media interconnections pertaining to global aesthetics.
Tapping into a diverse spectrum of influences - from experimental music and literature, to history and futurisms - Ukaigwe approaches his art practice as a double gesture. On one hand, his work is a way of annotating, augmenting, defacing, transposing, and rewriting in the margins of a palimpsestic history. On the other hand, his paintings, installations, and video works are an attempt to assemble and compose a speculative sensorium that permits hearing in a different tempo; one that collapses the subject-object divide and maps out both new and revised sociographies. A compositional practice that is fabulated out of the choice to meander in extant modes of being: fugitive, improvised, ongoing and otherwise.
His social practice is established on the foundations of splintered or shared authorship, community input, fracturing time, and relativity. On obtaining a BFA (Hons.) from the university of Manitoba in Canada, Chukwudubem has presented exhibitions and effectuated artist residencies locally and intercontinentally. Ukaigwe is a founding member of the curatorial force, Patterns collective. -
Anja Ulfeldt
Academic Staff - Hourly
BioAnja Ulfeldt is an interdisciplinary sculptor and durational installation artist working primarily in sculpture and time based media. Through interaction, sound, and performance, her work considers infrastructure and resources as they relate to ideas around stability, mobility and personal agency. Anja earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA from Stanford University. She has recently had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, Recology Artist in Residence Program and Sierra Arts Foundation, Reno.. She is a recipient of the Visions from the New California Award, the TSFF & SOMArts Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, The AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Finalist Award.
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Camille Utterback
Associate Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Computer Science
BioCamille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including The Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; ZERO1 The Art & Technology Network, San Jose, CA; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Utterback’s work is in private and public collections including Hewlett Packard, Itaú Cultural Institute in São Paolo, Brazil, and La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain.
Awards and honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002) and a commission from the Whitney Museum for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website (2002). Utterback holds a US patent for a video tracking system she developed while working as a research fellow at New York University (2004). Her work has been featured in The New York Times (2010, 2009, 2003, 2002, 2001), Art in America (October, 2004), Wired Magazine (February 2004), ARTnews (2001) and many other publications. It is also included in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art – Digital Art book (2003) by Christiane Paul.
Recent public commissions include works for the Liberty Mutual Group, the FOR-SITE Foundation, The Sacramento Airport, The City of San Jose, California, The City of Fontana, California, and the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Other commissions include projects for The American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, The Manhattan Children’s Museum, Herman Miller, Shiseido Cosmetics, and other private corporations.
Utterback is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. She holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently lives and works in San Francisco. -
Calvin Van Zytveld
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioCalvin Van Zytveld is pursuing a Ph.D. in Musicology at Stanford University. His research interests include hymnody of pre-industrial America and agricultural practices of the early modern period.
Calvin graduated summa cum laude in music from Princeton University, with a certificate in cello performance. Following graduation, he began master’s degrees in music composition and cello performance at the University of Michigan, but lost his vision suddenly in the second year of his studies due to Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON). Unable to read music, Calvin performs and writes music less frequently now, though he can be heard performing with the Plymouth Chamber Players, a grassroots chamber collective he co-directs with violinists Paolo Dara and Karisa Chiu in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Calvin enjoys organic vegetable gardening, drinking tea, and walking with his guide dog, Wake. -
Dejan Vasic
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Theater and Performance StudiesBioDejan Vasić is an art historian and curator of late modern and contemporary art and moving image media. He specializes in the transnational avant-garde and conceptual art, concentrating primarily on performance, video art, photography, and artists’ films and media works. His research intersects art, power, war, and everyday life, with methodological grounding in historical materialism, memory politics, decolonial, gender and feminist theory, and affirmation of critical thinking as a public good. Dejan is passionate about the history of exhibitions, museology and curatorial practice; he is invested in writings in the first person, and frequently collaborates with artists who battle social, economic and political problems.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Vasić had over a decade of experience in Serbia and the Yugoslav region, where he engaged in radical curatorial practices and critical writing that delves into the politics and ethics of aesthetics. Since 2012, he is a member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA and has served on the Program Advisory Board of AICA-Serbia (2020-2023). Dejan curated visual arts program at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (2017-2023), co-edited the Beton - Cultural Propaganda Kit (2018-2023), was part of the Four Faces of Omarska Working Group (2010-2015), the Culture of Memory curatorial platform (2010-2014) and Kontekst Collective (2009-2013). -
RJ Vasquez
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025
BioRJ Vasquez (he/him) is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on the history of American religions and gives particular attention to spiritual life, migration, labor, and the modern state. He is especially interested in spiritual life as a medium of historical agency.
Raised in California’s Central Valley, RJ earned an associate’s degree at Bakersfield College and a bachelor’s degree at California State University, Bakersfield. He completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard University before beginning his doctoral studies at Stanford.
RJ is also interested in digital humanities and directs a museum and archive revitalization project in his hometown of Wasco, California, where he works to add diversity and accessibility to his community’s shared history. -
Blakey Vermeule
Senior Associate Dean for Humanities and Arts and Albert Guérard Professor of Literature
BioBlakey Vermeule's research interests are neuroaesthetics, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to art, philosophy and literature, British literature from 1660-1820, post-Colonial fiction, satire, and the history of the novel. She is the author of The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000) and Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (2009), both from The Johns Hopkins University Press. She is writing a book about what mind science has discovered about the unconscious.
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Richard Vinograd
Christensen Professor of Asian Art
BioRichard Vinograd is the Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1989. Dr. Vinograd’s research interests include Chinese portraiture, landscape painting and cultural geography, urban cultural spaces, painting aesthetics and theory, art historiography, and inter-media studies. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); co-editor of New Understandings of Ming and Qing Painting (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy Painting Publishing House, 1994); and co-author of Chinese Art & Culture (New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 2001). He has published more than thirty journal articles, anthology chapters, conference papers, and catalogue essays on topics ranging from tenth-century landscape painting to contemporary transnational arts.
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Ban Wang
William Haas Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioWilliam Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University
Departments of East Asian Languages and Comparative Literature
Yangtze River Chair Professor, Simian Institute of Advanced Study,
East China Normal University -
Ge Wang
Associate Professor of Music and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
BioGe Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He specializes in the art of design and computer music — researching programming languages and interactive software design for music, interaction design, mobile music, laptop orchestras, expressive design of virtual reality, aesthetics of music technology design, and education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the author of the ChucK music programming language, the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk). Ge is also the Co-founder of Smule (reaching over 200 million users), and the designer of the iPhone's Ocarina and Magic Piano. Ge is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and the author of ARTFUL DESIGN: TECHNOLOGY IN SEARCH OF THE SUBLIME—a book on design and technology, art and life‚ published by Stanford University Press in 2018 (see https://artful.design/)
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Jamele Christa Watkins
Postdoctoral Scholar, German Studies
BioJamele Watkins researches and teaches on issues of race and gender in contemporary German performance, film, and literature (broadly speaking). She is currently working on a book project that focuses on Black internationalism and the solidarity campaigns for Angela Davis in the GDR. She completed her doctoral studies in German at UMass Amherst with the completion of dissertation, “The Drama of Race.” She has also studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
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Amir Weiner
Associate Professor of History
BioAmir Weiner’s research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. His first book, Making Sense of War analyzed the role and impact of the cataclysm of the Second World War on Soviet society and politics. His current project, Wild West, Window to the West engages the territories between the Baltic and Black Seas that were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, from the initial occupation to present. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; the Origins of Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.
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Leif Wenar
Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
BioLeif Wenar is a political philosopher. After receiving his AB at Stanford, he earned his PhD at Harvard, worked in Britain, and returned to Stanford in 2020.
He is the author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World and the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He is also the author of the entries for ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His articles have appeared in Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. He co-edited Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, as well as an autobiographical volume by the economist FA Hayek.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy.
His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force.
He is currently developing unity theory, a foundational account of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. His published work can be found at wenar.info. -
Katherine Whatley
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research examines the relationship between the written and the spoken word in Classical Japan. I take this relationship as the starting place and explore the role of music in Classical Japan through looking at words-as-song. From this vantage point, I argue that music was a primary mode of communication amongst people (especially women) and their surroundings—interpersonal, international, and inter-environmental. I am also a composer and koto performer working on a dissertation composition.
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Karen Wigen
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioKären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography at Stanford. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano.
An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis, and to co-direct the "Oceans Connect" project at Duke University. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas ( University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016). -
Caroline Winterer
William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics and of Education
BioCaroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science.
She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, and the history of science.
She is the author of six books, including most recently How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024).
She is currently accepting graduate students. For more information on the PhD program in the Department of History, visit: https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs. -
Laura Wittman
Associate Professor of French and Italian
BioLaura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in how modernity articulates new relationships between religious experience, embodiment, mortality, health, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.
Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012. It explores the creation and reception of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – an Italian, French, and British invention at the end of the First World War – as an emblem for modern mourning, from a cultural, historical, and literary perspective. It draws on literary and filmic evocations of the Unknown Soldier, as well as archival materials, to show that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is not pro-war, nationalist, or even proto-Fascist. Rather, it is a monument that heals trauma in two ways: first, it refuses facile consolations, and forcefully dramatizes the fact that suffering cannot be spiritualized or justified by any ideology; second, it rejects despair by enacting, through the concreteness of a particular body, a human solidarity in suffering that commands respect. Anticipating recent analyses of PTSD, the Memorial shows that when traumatic events are relived in a ritual, embodied, empathetic setting, healing occurs not via analysis but via symbolic communication and transmission of emotion.
Laura Wittman is the editor of a special issue of the Romanic Review entitled Italy and France: Imagined Geographies (2006), as well as the co-editor of an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles on d’Annunzio, Marinetti, Fogazzaro, Ungaretti, Montale, Sereni, and Merini, as well as on decadent-era culture and Italian cinema. With Jon Snyder and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, she recently co-edited a special issue of California Italian Studies on "The Sacred in Italian Culture" (2015).
She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism," an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term "mystic without God" in the works of Gabriele d'Annununzio and Paul Valéry.
In Spring 2009, she was organizer of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies (CICIS) Annual Conference, held at the Stanford Humanities Center; she is currently the organizer of the upcoming CICIS 2019 conference, also to be held at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was also organizer of the interdisciplinary conference on Language, Literature, and Mysticism held at the Stanford Humanities Center on 15 and 16 October 2010.
She is currently working on a new book entitled Lazarus' Silence that explores visions of the afterlife and visits to the underworld in modern literature and culture, as a window toward our changing attitudes toward death, accepting our mortality, and accompanying the dying. -
Mikael Wolfe
Associate Professor of History
BioI am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see teaching tab to the right. I am accepting graduate students to work under me, but before contacting me, please become familiar with my work. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your own research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.)
My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. In so doing, it demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement the latter, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.
The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?
To answer this global question, my book integrates environmental and technological history along with social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable.
My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather shapes the process of social revolution across Cuba’s varied climates and environments. In my new book project, Rebellious Climates: How Extreme Weather Shaped the Cuban Revolutions, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians.
