School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,181-1,200 of 1,320 Results
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Calvin Van Zytveld
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioCalvin Van Zytveld is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology who is also pursuing a Doctoral Certificate in Composition. His research focuses on sound recording and music notation. He is working on a dissertation titled 'Fixing Music: the Remediation of Sound and Performance through Notation and Recording 1958-2028,' which explores the means and motivations for fixing and affixing sounds past or future, real or fantastical. It includes chapters on text scores, microphone arrays, dynamic compression, and the pre-history of the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Calvin went blind suddenly and unexpectedly in 2020 due to Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON).
He is the Head Designer for BLIND ENVY, a project based at Stanford’s Center for Computer-based Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to make the first-ever non-visual digital devices for recording and editing audio. BLIND ENVY is a 2026 recipient of the Magic Grant from the Brown Institute.
An avid cellist, he has given solo and chamber music performances in Canada, Sweden, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, and China and played with such musicians and ensembles as Gustavo Dudamel, Robert Spano, Ludovic Morlot, Per Tengstrand, the Richardson Chamber Players, and the English Concert.
His compositions have been performed by Ensemble Mosaik, Plymouth Chamber Players, NEKO3, Distractfold, Peninsula Women’s Chorus, Grand Rapids Choir of Men and Boys, Princeton University Orchestra, and the Princeton Camerata.
He co-directs and performs in two festivals in his hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 2016, Plymouth Chamber Players offers classical chamber concerts free of charge and features members of the Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Grand Rapids symphony orchestras. Across town, 2026 was the inaugural year of Fountain Fest. The festival stretched across four days and included punk rock, rave, stand-up comedy, film screenings, live-coded choir and organ, jazz, free improvisation, and guided meditation.
Calvin graduated summa cum laude in music from Princeton University, where he studied with Steven Mackey and Donnacha Dennehy. He pursued master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, studying composition with Bright Sheng and cello with Richard Aaron.
Recent awards and fellowships include the 2025 Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2026 New Music USA Creator Fund, the RAISE fellowship for community-based research, and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF). -
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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Matías Walker
Ph.D. Student in Philosophy, admitted Autumn 2026
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI'm interested in making contributions on both the metaphysical and logical fronts of philosophical questions. My doctoral project will combine tools from modal logic, model theory, higher-order semantics and formal metaphysics, with particular attention to the relationship between logical structure and its semantical reach in metaphysical interpretation.
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Zach Wallis
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioZach Wallis is a PhD student in the Department of History in the field of British history. His research focuses on political economy, energy, and the environment in Australia, New Zealand, and the Southwest Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is especially interested in understanding how conjoined political-economic and environmental transformations across the Pacific in this period prefigured the Great Acceleration in significant ways. Some of his other research interests include the environmental history of the First World War, historical theory, and theories of socio-metabolism.
Before coming to Stanford, Zach earned a B.A. in history from McGill University, a Master of History from the Australian National University, and a M.A in history from the University of Chicago. His dissertation at the University of Chicago, which won the Raymond D. Fogelson Thesis Prize, was a study of settler ecological thinking in late nineteenth century New Zealand. He has also previously undertaken research into late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian intellectual history, and he has been published on the topic in History Australia.
