School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 201-300 of 1,550 Results
-
Chris Chafe
Duca Family Professor
BioChris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's jacktrip project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in sometimes novel venues. An early network project was a simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.
-
Enrique Chagoya
Professor of Art and Art History
BioDrawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy.
Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. His father, a bank employee by day and artist by night, encouraged his interest in art by teaching Chagoya color theory and how to sketch at a very early age. As a young adult, Chagoya enrolled in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he studied political economy and contributed political cartoons to union newsletters. He relocated to Veracruz and directed a team focused on rural-development projects, a time he describes as “an incredible growing experience…[that] made me form strong views on what was happening outside in the world.” This growing political awareness would later surface in Chagoya’s art. At age 26, Chagoya moved to Berkeley, California and began working as a free-lance illustrator and graphic designer. Disheartened by what he considered to be the narrow political scope of economics programs in local colleges, Chagoya turned his interests to art. He enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a BFA in printmaking in 1984. He then pursued his MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1987. He moved to San Francisco in 1995. He has been exhibitng his work nationally and internationally for over two decades with a major retrospective organized by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa in 2007 that traveled to UC Berkelye Art Museum and to the Palms Spring Art Museum in 2008 ( fully illustrated bilingual catalog was published). In the Fall of 2013, a major survey of his work opened at Centro Museum ARTIUM, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital city of the Basque Country, near Bilbao, Spain (with a trilingual catalog documenting the exhibition). The exhibition will travel to the CAAM in the Canary Islands in 2015.
He is currently Full Professor at Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History and his work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others. He has been recipient of numerous awards such as two NEA artists fellowships, one more from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, residencies at Giverny and Cite Internationale des Arts in France, and a Tiffany fellowship to mention a few.
He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, George Adams Gallery in New York, and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. His prints are published by Shark’s Ink in Lyons, Co, Electric Works in San Francisco, CA, Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA, ULAE Bay Shore, NY, Segura Publishing in Pueblo, AZ, Trillium press in Brisbaine, CA, Made in California in Oakland, CA, and Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto, CA. -
Gordon H. Chang
Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI co-direct an international project that seeks to recover the history of Chinese railroad workers in North America.
-
Yan Chang
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2021
BioYan Chang is a Ph.D. student in modern and contemporary East Asian literatures, cultures, and media. His research interests currently center on trans-linguality, trans-culture, and trans-nationality in post-Cold War Japanophone literature. His academic concerns also include visuality and modernity of modern Japanese literature in the Taisho period as well as Shanghai urbanization and the concomitant media representations in the 1990s. Before joining Stanford, Yan received a joint B.A. in Economics and Japanese from Shanghai International Studies University, an M.A. in Japanese Culture Studies from Nagoya University, and an M.A. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities.
-
Anne Harper Charity Hudley
Associate Dean of Educational Affairs, Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education and, Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics
BioAnne H. Charity Hudley, Ph.D., is Associate Dean of Educational Affairs and the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University and Professor of African-American Studies and Linguistics by courtesy. She is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the Symbolic Systems Program. She also serves as the Jan Barker Alexander Resident Fellow for the Ujamaa House. Her research and publications address the relationship between language variation and educational practices and policies from preschool through graduate school. She has a particular emphasis on creating high-impact practices for underrepresented students in higher education. Charity Hudley is the co-author of four books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research; We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom; Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools; and Talking College: Making Space for Black Linguistic Practices in Higher Education. Her fifth book, Talking Faculty: Professional and Linguistic Choices for Black Faculty Thriving in U.S. Higher Education, will appear in 2026. She is the co-editor of several collections, including Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics.
Her other publications have appeared in Language, The Journal of English Linguistics, Child Development, Language Variation, and Change, American Speech, Language and Linguistics Compass, Perspectives on Communication Disorders and Sciences in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations, and many book collections, including The Handbook of African-American Psychology, Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education, Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, and Oxford Handbook of Language in Society. She has been an invited speaker for numerous keynotes and academic meetings, provides lectures and workshops for K-12 teachers, and generously contributes to community initiatives and public intellectual work.
Dean Charity Hudley is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her contributions have been recognized with a Public Engagement Award from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, an award from the Linguistic Society of America, and funding from NIH, NSF, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Professor Charity Hudley has served on the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America; the Standing Committee on Research of the National Council of Teachers of English; as a consultant to the National Research Council Committee on Language and Education; and to the NSF’s Committee on Broadening Participation in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Sciences. In addition, she has served as an Associate Editor for Language and on the editorial board of Language and Linguistics Compass and the Linguistic Society of America Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education.
Dean Charity Hudley was previously the North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at U.C. Santa Barbara. At UC Santa Barbara, she also served as the Director of Undergraduate Research, Vice-Chair of the Council of Planning and Budget, and a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL). -
Jennifer Chien
Postdoctoral Scholar, Philosophy
BioJennifer Chien earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego, and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Wellesley College. They were a recipient of the Graduate Fellowship for STEM Diversity. Jennifer is an interdisciplinary researcher focused on preserving user agency across AI/ML pipelines by linking technical decisions with their social consequences. Their work connects technical decisions with social and societal consequences to characterize, measure, and mitigate disparities in autonomy and support safer, more responsible AI. This includes exploring instrumental, cognitive and affective, and epistemic forms of agency. At UCSD, they served as President of Graduate Women in Computing, leading mentorship, outreach, and community-building initiatives and received the Doctoral Awards for Contributions to Diversity and to Service and Leadership, as well as the Xilinx Women in Technology University Grant. Jennifer is currently an Embedded Ethics Fellow in partnership with HAI and the Computer Science department.
-
Stephen Choy
Asst. Director of Finance and Administration, Philosophy
Current Role at StanfordAssistant Director of Finance and Operations: Department of Philosophy & Department of Religious Studies
-
Eve Clark
Richard Lyman Professor in the Humanities, Emerita
BioI am interested in first language acquisition, the acquisition of meaning, acquisitional principles in word-formation compared across children and languages, and general semantic and pragmatic issues in the lexicon and in language use. I am currently working on the kinds of pragmatic information adults offer small children as they talk to them, and on children's ability to make use of this information as they make inferences about unfamiliar meanings and about the relations between familiar and unfamiliar words. I am interested in the inferences children make about where to 'place' unfamiliar words, how they identify the relevant semantic domains, and what they can learn about conventional ways to say things based on adult responses to child errors during acquisition. All of these 'activities' involve children and adults placing information in common ground as they interact. Another current interest of mine is the construction of verb paradigms: how do children go from using a single verb form to using forms that contrast in meaning -- on such dimensions as person, number, and tense? How do they learn to distinguish the meanings of homophones? To what extent do they make use of adult input to discern the underlying structure of the system? And how does conversation with more expert speakers (usually adults) foster the acquisition of a first language? I am particularly interested in the general role of practice along with feedback here.
-
Amanda Coate
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Research Assistant, History DepartmentBioAmanda Coate is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. She works on the cultural and intellectual histories of early modern Europe. She is particularly interested in the history of famine and hunger, animal-human interactions, the history of medicine and related fields of knowledge, and how people have conceptualized human nature and the extremes of human behavior, such as survival cannibalism. Her dissertation, "Experiences and Meanings of Hunger in Early Modern Europe, c. 1550-1700," examines early modern European cultural understandings of hunger and food scarcity. Using a wide range of sources (including diaries, sermons, news pamphlets, and medical literature), her dissertation tracks the multifaceted ways in which early modern Europeans experienced, portrayed, and comprehended their own and others’ hunger. Her work has been supported by Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences, the Europe Center at Stanford University, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University, and the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University.
Amanda's article, "An Elephant in Dublin: Animals and Knowledge in the Late Seventeenth Century," was recently published in the journal Early Science and Medicine. She has been a writer for the blog Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, and has written and recorded a podcast episode, "Cannibalism at the Siege of Sancerre," for the French History Podcast. Amanda is also enthusiastic about fostering appreciation for history and the humanities through teaching and is currently working on completing an Associate Level Teaching Certificate from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning. -
David Cohen
Professor (Teaching) of Classics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research includes book projects on World War II war crimes trials; the Tokyo and Nuremberg International Military Tribunals; analysis of blasphemy prosecutions in Indonesia; analysis of the misuse of electronic communication, criminal defamation, lese majeste, blasphemy and asspociated laws in Southeast Asia; international best practices on whistleblower protection and justiuce collaborators in corruption cases in ASEAN; the UN justice process in East Timor under the Special Panels for Serious Crimes; comparative study of strategic decision making in American, British, and Japanese policy circles in WWII; analysis of the Judgment in Case 002/2 at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia.
-
Margaret Cohen
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProfessor Cohen has devoted her career to the literature and culture of modernity. Her books include Profane Illumination (1993) on the impact of surrealist Paris on Walter Benjamin; The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), on the role of women writers in shaping 19th-century French realism; and The Novel and the Sea (2010), about how writings about work at sea shaped the adventure novel. Her forthcoming book explores how underwater film and TV have shaped the cultural imagination.
-
Catherine Nicole Coleman
Research Director, Humanities+Design, Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research
Affiliate, ClassicsBioNicole is Digital Research Architect for the Stanford University Libraries and Research Director for Humanities+Design, a research lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Nicole works at the intersection of the digital library and digital scholarship as a lead architect in the design and development of practical research services. She is currently leading an initiative within the Library to identify and enact applications of artificial intelligence —machine perception, machine learning, machine reasoning, and language recognition— to make the collections of maps, photographs, manuscripts, data sets and other assets more easily discoverable, accessible, and analyzable.
At Humanities + Design she has led the design and development of numerous tools for data visualization and analysis including Palladio, Breve, and Data Pen. The lab encourages and supports collaboration between researchers from the humanities and design to encode interpretive method in tools for data analysis. Lessons learned in that work have proven essential to improving the design of machine learning based tools for research. -
Anthony M. Comeau
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
BioAnthony Comeau is a first year PhD student in Stanford's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research interests broadly include political thought and its history and comparative literature. Anthony is particularly interested in the themes of love, education, and humanism in the comparative reception of canonical philosophers, theologians, and novelists in the modern Sinosphere, West, and Hispanosphere.
-
David Como
Joan Danforth Professor of History
BioMy teaching and research focus on the following areas of interest:
Puritanism, Politics
English Revolution
History of print
History of Political Thought
History of Religion and the Reformation
Global History -
Jon Cooper
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioJon Cooper is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University. He is focused broadly on intellectual history in early modern Europe, with a special interest in the history of political economy in Britain and its empire. His dissertation project is provisionally entitled “Dealing with Money: A Genealogy of Economic Theology in England, 1544–1623".
-
Ioanida Costache
Assistant Professor of Music
BioIoanida Costache is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology, and, by courtesy, Anthropology, at Stanford University. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Her work explores the legacies of Romani historical trauma, and the feminist critiques of the present, inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art. Her writing has been published in EuropeNow, RevistaARTA, Critical Romani Studies, and is forthcoming in European History Quarterly. Her research has been supported by two Fulbright Grants and the Council of European Studies. She has held visiting and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the USC Shoah Foundation.
Her book project, Hearing Romani-ness, examines how music structures the political and social belonging of Romani peoples in ways that reify and work against processes of identity formation and racialization. Through an ethnographic focus on Romani musicians, the project shows how intergenerational memory of Romani trauma is discreetly imbedded in sonic expressions of sorrow within a bounded repertoire that in being kept private served as a vehicle for Romani collective healing. The book puts forth a new framework for navigating how sound, when heard as affective expression, can be used for reparative purposes in the wake of persecution, while also offering an interpretive and analytic vocabulary for learning to listen for the Roma. -
Christopher Costanza
Senior Lecturer of Music
BioFor over three decades cellist Christopher Costanza has enjoyed a varied and exciting career as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. A winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and a recipient of a prestigious Solo Recitalists Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Costanza has performed to wide critical acclaim in nearly every state in the U.S., and in Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Australia, New Zealand, China, Korea, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, and Hungary. His summer festival appearances include the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, Santa Fe, Taos, Chamber Music Northwest, Seattle, Bay Chamber Concerts, Ottawa, and Bravo! Vail Valley festivals. Mr. Costanza is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied cello with Laurence Lesser, David Wells, and Bernard Greenhouse, and chamber music with Eugene Lehner, Louis Krasner, and Leonard Shure.
Mr. Costanza joined the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) in 2003, and tours and records extensively with that ensemble, performing over 100 concerts annually throughout the world. As a member of the SLSQ, he is an Artist in Residence at Stanford University, where he teaches cello and chamber music and performs a wide variety of formal and informal concerts each season, from the stages of the University’s concert halls to student dormitories and lecture halls. A strong proponent of contemporary music, Mr. Costanza works regularly with the world’s most notable composers, such as John Adams, Jonathan Berger, Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Applebaum, Pierre Boulez, George Tsontakis, Roberto Sierra, R. Murray Schafer, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, and Bright Sheng. As a student, he had the honor of studying Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” under the guidance of the composer.
Mr. Costanza’s discography includes numerous chamber music and solo recordings on the Nonesuch, EMI/Angel, Naxos, Innova, Albany, Summit, and ArtistShare labels. In 2006, he received a Grammy nomination for his recording of major chamber works for winds and strings by Mozart. Additionally, several St. Lawrence String Quartet recordings on EMI have also been nominated for Juno awards. Mr. Costanza's recordings of the iconic Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach, along with his commentary on each suite, can be found on his website, costanzacello.com. In August, 2019, the SLSQ released its latest recording, of all six Op. 20 String Quartets of Haydn, in three formats: CD’s, on-line through streaming platforms, and limited-edition vinyl LP’s.
Mr. Costanza is frequently heard on radio broadcasts worldwide, including the CBC in Canada, NPR in the United States, and on various European broadcasting networks. He is privileged to perform on an early 18th century Venetian cello, part of the Harry R. Lange Collection of Instruments and Bows at Stanford.
In addition to his varied musical interests, Mr. Costanza is an avid long-distance runner and hiker. A self-described train enthusiast, he enjoys riding and exploring the passenger railways of the world. He is fascinated by architecture and seeks out innovative architectural offerings of each city he visits on tour. At home in California, he is passionate about cooking, focusing his attention on new and creative dishes which take advantage of the abundance of remarkable organic local produce. Mr. Costanza's wife, Debra Fong, is a wonderful violinist, and their daughter, Isabella, is a terrific violist currently studying at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto. -
Robert Crews
Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAfghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (book manuscript co-authored with Wazhmah Osman, under contract with Oxford University Press).
Muslims from the Margins: The Politics of Islam in a Global Age (book manuscript – a history of the politics of Muslim minority communities in Mexico, Ghana, India, Russia, and Northern Ireland)
The Afghan Shia: A Revolutionary Minority (book manuscript) -
Meg Cychosz
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
BioDr. Cychosz investigates how infants and children develop speech and language, including children who are d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing and multilingual learners. Her research bridges linguistics, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and electrical engineering to understand fundamental questions about language acquisition. Her interdisciplinary approach combines fieldwork with computational methods, using deep learning and automatic speech recognition tools to analyze naturalistic speech recordings from children's daily lives. She is particularly interested in how children's processing limitations might influence the structure of the world's languages, how sensory experiences like hearing loss affect language processing in early childhood, and how technological innovations can make language research more accessible and representative. Dr. Cychosz directs the Speech and Cognitive Development Lab and collaborates with clinical partners in audiology and speech-language pathology to ensure her research has translational impact to support children's language development.
-
Laura Dahl
Senior Lecturer of Music
BioPianist Laura Dahl is an active international performer and educator, appearing in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall and Stern Grove Festival, Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University, the Carmel Bach Festival, and the Henley Festival in Great Britain. A specialist in collaborative performance and chamber music, Dahl is the founder and artistic director of the Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson Recital Series at Stanford University, as well as Music by the Mountain, a chamber music festival in Northern California. Dahl is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at Stanford University, where she teaches collaborative and solo piano, chamber music, art song interpretation, and diction. She has also taught at the New National Theatre Young Artists Training Program in Tokyo, Japan.
Dahl’s education featured training on both coasts of the US and in Germany. She was the first musician to be named a German Chancellor’s Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She lived two years in Germany, studying under pianist Phillip Moll, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and pianist and composer Aribert Reimann. Dahl holds degrees from the University of Michigan School of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a student of Martin Katz, Eckart Sellheim, and Margo Garrett. A graduate of San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Dahl served as Assistant Conductor for Western Opera Theater and was Associate Director of the San Francisco Boys Chorus. She has been a coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music and the University of Michigan Opera Theater. She was an invited fellow at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center for two years, in addition to studies at the Banff Academy of Singing (Canada) and the Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara, California). Dahl was born and raised in the western states of Colorado and Montana. -
Richard Dasher
Adjunct Professor
BioRichard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center (US-ATMC) at Stanford University since 1994. He served concurrently as the Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems in Stanford's School of Engineering from 1998 - 2015. His research and teaching focus on the flow of people, knowledge, and capital in innovation systems, on the impact of new technologies on industry value chains, and on open innovation management. Dr. Dasher was the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving as a Board Director and member of the Management Council of Tohoku University from 2004 - 2010. He has served on th Program Committee of the $1.3 billion/year World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of Japan since its inception in 2007, and he has also served on program and review committees of other national science and technology funding programs, national research institutes, and universities in Canada, Japan, and Thailand. He is a Founding Partner of the Tokyo-based VC firm Global Hands-On Venture Capital (GHOVC), and he is an advisor to start-up companies, business accelerators, venture capital firms, and nonprofits in Silicon Valley, Japan, India, and S. Korea. Dr. Dasher received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University. Before coming to the US-ATMC, he served as board director of two small companies in Tokyo, developing international business from 1990 - 93. From 1986 – 90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department’s Advanced Language and Area Training Centers in Japan and Korea that provide full-time curricula to U.S. and Commonwealth Country diplomats assigned to those countries.
-
Adrian Daub
J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioMy research focuses on the long nineteenth century, in particular questions of gender in literature, music and philosophy. My first book, "Zwillingshafte Gebärden": Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), traces four-hand piano playing as both a cultural practice and a motif in literature, art and philosophy (an English edition of the book recently appeared as Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)). My second book Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explored German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche. Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013), deals with eroticism in German opera after Wagner. My most recent academic book, The Dynastic Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2020) traces the fate of the dynasty in the age of the nuclear family. A comparative and intermedial study of the ballad-form in nineteenth century Europe will appear in 2022 with Oxford University Press. In addition, I have published articles on topics such as fin-de-siècle German opera, women composers in the 19th century, the history of feminist philosophy, the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, film music, literature and scandal, the legacies of Richard Wagner, the cultural use of ballads in the nineteenth century, and writers like Novalis, Stefan George, Walter Benjamin, Sophie Mereau, Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald. I also write on popular culture and politics: in this capacity I co-wrote The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (with Charles Kronengold) and published a German-language essay collection Pop Up Nation (Hanser, 2016). My book What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) has been translated into five languages. I write articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Die Zeit (Germany), The Guardian (UK), The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads and the LA Review of Books. More information can be found on my personal website adriandaub.com.
I am the Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities. I have previously directed the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) and the Department of German Studies. -
J. P. Daughton
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioJ. P. Daughton is a historian of modern Europe, imperialism and colonialism, and global history. His teaching and publications explore political, cultural, social, and environmental history, as well as the modern history of religion, technology, and humanitarianism. His affiliations at Stanford include the Europe Center, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
His most recent book, In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021), tells the story of one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Between 1921 and 1934, French colonial interests recruited -- most often by force -- more than 100,000 men, women, and children to work on a 500-kilometer stretch of rail between Brazzaville and the Atlantic Coast. In the end, tens of thousands of Africans were dead, killed by mistreatment, starvation, and disease. The book painstakingly recounts the experiences of local communities in the face of colonial economic development, considers why the railroad witnessed such extraordinary violence and suffering, and explores how the rhetoric of "civilization" and "development" were used to justify the loss of so many African lives. In the Forest of No Joy was reviewed widely, including in the Economist, the New York Review of Books, the TLS, and the New Yorker. It was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and was a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Prize. A French translation is forthcoming with Éditions du Seuil.
Daughton is also the author of An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2006), a book that tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the decades before the First World War. Based on archival research from four continents, the book challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and “civilizing” goals were the product of a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals. A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, An Empire Divided was awarded the George Louis Beer Prize for the best book in international history from the American Historical Association, as well as the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society.
Daughton's current book project explores the role of fraud and corruption in modern imperialism through the story of a late-nineteenth-century con man who convinced hundreds of men and women from across Europe to attempt to colonize an uninhabited corner of Papua-New Guinea. The book will be published by W.W. Norton in 2027.
He is also the editor, with Owen White, of In God’s Empire: French Missionaries in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collection of essays on the role played by French religious workers in the empire and beyond. His essays and reviews, on themes related to colonial violence, international governance, informal empire, and cultural policy, have appeared in publications like the Journal of Modern History, the American Historical Review, and French Historical Studies. He has received awards and fellowships from the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Daughton’s PhD advisees have written on a wide range of subjects, from nineteenth-century French cultural policies to the history of famine, and from alcohol consumption in the First World War to the work of international NGOs in Algeria during decolonization. He is currently accepting graduate students interested in modern Europe, empire, humanitarianism, international politics, war and society, and environmental history.