School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,101-1,150 of 1,551 Results
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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
BioI am an Italianist, an early modernist and a Michelangelo scholar. My primary research and teaching contributions center on Italian literature and cultural history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a special focus on lyric poetry and on the relationship between literature and spirituality.
My first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Jeanne and Aldo Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association in 2013. Literary, cultural and historical in scope, this study considers the Florentine artist’s poetics and aesthetics in light of medieval and Renaissance Augustinianism, lay religious culture, and the Italian Reformation, respectively, to provide a more nuanced understanding of Michelangelo’s spirituality and how it functioned.
My current book project, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy, builds on this earlier work to consider the ways in which male and female poets of devotional verse engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth century. Combining diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of early modern Italian verse, this project examines relations among religious practice and poetic form in the pre-Tridentine and post-Tridentine periods.
Other book-length projects include Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts and Expressions (Toronto: CRRS, 2014), a co-edited volume that explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a well-ordered series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization: the courtly love tradition, Renaissance humanism; the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the attendant confessionalization and wars of religion; Jesuit missions; the colonization of America; and lastly, expanding trade patterns in the Age of Discovery.
Prior to joining Stanford, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University and at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where I designed and taught early modern cultural history courses and lectured on Italian language and literature.
In parallel to my scholarly pursuits, I am completing a work of historical fiction inspired by my academic research. Taking the dramatic events of the French invasion of Italy in the fall of 1494 as its context, Imminence: Florence, 1494 recounts the riveting and tumultuous history of the dangerously divided Florentine city-state through the experiences of a lay female visionary temporarily resident in an elite nunnery tied to the highest echelons of political power. An imagined female story seamlessly inserted into a famously documented male history, Imminence weaves strands of verisimilitude with threads of reality, to offer a tapestry of fiction and non-fiction that touches on persistent human challenges – personal, social, and political. An exercise in empathic historical imagination, this novel explores women’s political, social, cultural, and religious history during the exciting and pivotal moment of the Italian Renaissance.
You can learn more about my academic and creative pursuits at www.sarahprodan.com. -
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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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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Rush Rehm
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and of Classics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStanford Repertory Theater (SRT) will present *Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond* at the Sebastopol Arts Center on November 7, 2021. The audio/visual version and/or the script is available for use by schools, arts councils, and environmental groups, free of charge, Contact stanfordrep@stanford.edu, or go to our website stanfordreptheater.com. Join the fight to save human and animal life on our planet!
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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.
