School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 601-700 of 1,364 Results
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Srdan Keca
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
BioSrđan Keča is a Yugoslav-born filmmaker, visual artist and educator living in the U.S.
His documentary films have been selected at leading festivals, including the Berlinale, IDFA and HotDocs, while his video installations have been exhibited at venues like the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Whitechapel Gallery. His early medium-length films include A Letter to Dad (IDFA 2011, Dokufest 2011 - Best Balkan Documentary) and Mirage (Jihlava IDFF 2012 - Best Central and Eastern European Documentary). Flotel Europa, an archival feature-length film produced and edited by Keča, premiered at the Berlinale in 2015, winning the Tagesspiegel Jury Award, and went on to win awards at numerous festivals including Documenta Madrid, Torino Film Festival, and IndieLisboa. His latest film, the poetic-observational feature Museum of the Revolution premiered at IDFA in 2021, and won awards including the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Documentary at Sarajevo Film Festival and Best Feature at Big Sky Documentary Festival. It has been released theatrically in Europe and North America and broadcast on major networks.
Keča’s work has been praised in The New York Times, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, Variety and POV Magazine, among others. He is an alum of the Ateliers Varan and UK’s National Filmand Television School (NFTS), and a Sundance Institute grantee. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University and Program Director of Stanford’s M.F.A. in Documentary Film. -
Burçak Keskin Kozat
Director of Finance & Operations, History Department
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Finance & Operations
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Alex Ketley
Advanced Lecturer, Dance
BioAlex Ketley is an independent choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and LINES Ballet, he left dancing professionally to create The Foundry as a platform to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance. The company has allowed Ketley the freedom to pursue projects that would be difficult to realize within his commissioning career. A few examples of these are: Syntax, an hour long duet systemically using the mechanics of language as an organizing mechanism; Lost Line researched how the application of environment affects the generation of movement and studied in direct response to California's diverse physical landscapes; Please Love Me jettisoned the structure of performing in a theater context and was developed with a curiosity about how people genuinely connect and experience artwork; the No Hero Trilogy which was a multi-year project that explored what dance and performance means to the lives of people living throughout rural America, and Distal Imprint was a film created in collaboration with artist and Death-Row inmate Bill Clark. The Foundry’s diverse work has been enthusiastically received by audiences, the press, and funders.
For his independent work as a choreographer he has been commissioned extensively throughout the United States, as well as projects in Germany and Italy, and has received acknowledgement from the Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition, the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, the Choo-San Goh Award, the Princess Grace Award for Choreography, four Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Residencies, the Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Award, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Choreographic Initiative Residency, a Kenneth Rainin Foundation New and Experimental Works Grant, three CHIME Fellowships, the Artistry Award from the Superfest International Disability Film Festival, and his work was featured on national television through an invitation from the show So You Think You Can Dance. His pieces and collaborations have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the categories of; Choreography, Company, and Ensemble, as well as nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design. In 2020 he became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors in the United States recognizing “individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts”.
As an educator he has taught extensively throughout the country and currently holds the position of Advanced Lecturer at Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies Department. He was the founding Resident Choreographer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance for fourteen years until its closure in 2018.
Since 2020 he has been collaborating with his friend Bill Clark who is a prolific artist and writer that has been incarcerated on Death Row for the past 33 years. Alex invited Bill as a guest for his Stanford University class called DanceAcution: Performance Practice, Death Row, and the Evolution of Cultural Reform. The class used Bill’s vast experience as an artist and incarcerated individual as the platform for the students to develop new performance work. Bill is now collaborating with The Foundry on a new evening length work titled An Approximation of Resilience set to premiere in 2025. The project has won the prestigious National Dance Project Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and generous support from the Luger Charitable Trust.
He is also on the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus, an organization whose work focuses on abolishing both the death penalty and LWOP (Life Without Parole). -
Suchismito Khatua
Ph.D. Student in Modern Thought and Literature, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Art History
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Grad Writing Tutor, Hume CenterBioSuchismito Khatua is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and visual cultures from South Asia and its diasporas. His doctoral work traces figurations of negativity and discontent across post-revolutionary avant-gardes, including poetry, fiction, cinema, and computational media, moving between Postcolonial Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory, Critical Caste Studies, and Translation. He was previously affiliated with the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He writes in both Bangla and English.
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John Kieschnick
Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioProfessor Kieschnick specializes in Chinese Buddhism, with particular emphasis on its cultural history. He is the author of the Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval China and the Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. He is currently working on a book on Buddhist interpretations of the past in China, and a primer for reading Buddhist texts in Chinese.
John is chair of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.
Ph.D., Stanford University (1996); B.A., University of California at Berkeley (1986). -
Minju Kim
Lecturer, Music
BioDr. Minju Kim, a pianist from South Korea, is an accomplished soloist, chamber musician, and collaborative artist. With a deep passion for chamber music, Minju has participated as a fellow in collaborative piano at the Bowdoin International Music Festival and Music Academy of the West. She has also performed in piano trios as part of the Heifetz International Music Institute's chamber music programs. Minju won first place in the Sidney Wright Accompanying Competition at the University of Texas at Austin and served as a studio pianist for the legendary cellist Janos Starker at Indiana University.
Before moving to Stanford, Minju held positions as a collaborative pianist at Shoreline Community College, Seattle University, Northwest Girlchoir, and Bellevue Chamber Chorus. She was also a frequent performer on local concerts, radio programs, and competitions in the Seattle area, collaborating with a wide range of musicians.
Minju holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from Seoul National University (Korea), a Master of Music and Performer Diploma from Indiana University, a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Music in Collaborative Piano from the New England Conservatory. -
Nancy Kollmann
Professor, History
Professor, History Department
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, HistoryCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsOctober 2018: In 2017 I published a synthetic history -- "The Russian empire 1450-1801" (Oxford). I am working on images of Russia in early modern Europe, generally by eyewitness travelers but also in the scurrilous penny press. I'm exploring how the tropes of engraving culture shaped images, how knowledge of Russia was disseminated and what image of Russia literate Europeans received. Then I'll return to the law -- Catherine II's 1772 judicial reforms on the local level across the Empire.
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Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
CCRMA Student Assistant, MusicBioKimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is an Iranian composer and performer. She writes for hybrid instrumental/electronic ensembles, creates electroacoustic and audiovisual works, builds instruments, and performs electronic music. She explores the unfamiliar familiar while being motivated by how melodies unfold through time; finding ways to play with various musical thresholds and exploring musical extremes is something that she is currently attracted to. Her work experiments with merging Iranian music with the more contemporary classical music aesthetics.
Being a cross-disciplinary artist, she has actively collaborated on projects evolving around dance, film, and theater. She is the co-founder and producer of Fashion x Electronics, a collective focused on creating interdisciplinary works based on fashion and electronic music.
Kimia’s work has been showcased by organizations across the globe and her work has been performed internationally at festivals including Ars Electronica, Festival Ecos Urbanos, Tehran Contemporary Sounds, Sonic Matter Festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Sound and Music Conference, and Modulus Festival, among others.
She holds a BFA in Music Composition from Simon Fraser University’s Interdisciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts. Kimia is currently based in San Francisco and is a doctorate candidate in Music Composition at Stanford University. -
Jan Krawitz
Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDocumentary film, women's issues
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Christopher Krebs
Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioChristopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He was a lecturer at University College (Oxford) and an assistant (2004-09) and then associate professor (2009-12) at the department of the Classics at Harvard, before he joined the Classics department at Stanford. In the spring of 2007 he was the professeur invité at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), in 2008/9 the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (on which see his “You say putator” in the TLS), and, most recently, the recipient of the Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
His publications include Negotiatio Germaniae. Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and A most dangerous book. Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), which has or will be translated into six languages. He has also co-edited a volume on Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 as well as an intellectual history of the late Roman Republic (with W.W. Norton); he is also co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Caesar. Other long-term projects and interests focus on Posidonius, Sallust and Tacitus, Latin lexicography, Thersites and Prometheus, and Annio di Viterbo.
He organized and co-chaired a seminar on Classical Traditions at Harvard Humanities Center, where he also co-hosted a conference on “The Reception of Odysseus in Literature, Art, and Music” (April 2009). He co-organized a conference on “The historians’ Plupast” (2006), an APA Panel on “Caesar the ‘Litterator’” (January 2012), and a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist,” at Amherst College (September 2012). He will deliver the third annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies (at Emory University) in the fall of 2013 and the forty-third Skotheim Lecture in History (at Whitman College) in the spring of 2014. In the summer of 2014 he will co-teach in France a seminar on Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute.
Most recent and forthcoming articles include: “Annum quiete et otio transiit: Tacitus (Agr. 6.3) and Sallust on liberty, tyranny, and human dignity” (A Companion to Tacitus), “M. Manlius Capitolinus: the metaphorical plupast and metahistorical reflections” (The historians’ Plupast), “Caesar, Lucretius and the dates of De Rerum Natura and the Commentarii” (Classical Quarterly), and “Caesar’s Sisenna” (Classical Quarterly).
In 2012-13 he will offer the following courses: Advanced Latin: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline; Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians (cross-listed in Anthropology); a freshman seminar Eloquence Personified: How to Speak Like Cicero; and a graduate seminar on Sallust and Virgil. In 2013-14 he will offer graduate seminars on The fragmentary Roman Historians and Lucan and the poetics of civil war, advanced Greek: Attic Orators and advanced Latin: Tacitus. He also teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies: a course on Tacitus (Tacitus: Character Assassin, Satirist, and Trenchant Historian) in the winter term, and a course on Lucan (The Dark Genius: Lucan, his civil war epos, and the court of Nero) in the spring. -
Marci Kwon
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
BioMarci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the Cantor Art Center's Asian American Art Initiative. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton, 2021), and co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné. She is the recipient of Stanford’s Asian American Teaching Prize, CCSRE Teaching Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Women's Faculty Forum Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, and the Mellon Foundation Emerging Faculty Leader award.
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Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and The World According to Proust (Oxford, 2023). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu," while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions. How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities. The World According to Proust (now in paperback as Marcel Proust: A Very Short Introduction) is a reader's guide to "In Search of Lost Time."
Professor Landy has published essays in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Narrative, SubStance, Arion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues, as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to Proust.
Since 2017, Professor Landy has co-hosted the nationally syndicated public radio show "Philosophy Talk." He has also appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "To the Best of our Knowledge."
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. -
Joaquín Lara Midkiff
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2025
Other Tech - Graduate, History DepartmentBioJoaquín Lara Midkiff is a doctoral student studying as Dean's Fellow in the Department of History at Stanford University whose scholarship focuses on the social and labor movements of Indigenous Mexican and Central American communities in the United States during the twentieth century.
His earlier work centered Mixteco and Triqui encounters with carcerality, pan-Indigenous coalition-building, and racialized agricultural labor in the Pacific Northwest during the late twentieth century.
His scholarship and commentary has been published or is forthcoming in the Western Historical Quarterly, Truthout, and The Oregonian, among others. His poetry appears in The Future Lives in Our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press) and Crab Creek Review.
At Stanford, he has also received the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) and Research, Action, and Impact through Strategic Engagement (RAISE) fellowships, and organizes the Latin American & Caribbean History Workshop (2026-27).
Joaquín lives with his family in Salem, Oregon, where he has served on various public and non-profit boards, including Cherriots (Salem Area Mass Transit), the Oregon Disabilities Commission, and PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union. He earned his B.A. from Yale University. -
William R. Leben
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent project:
"Advertising and the Language of Persuasion," a book for Oxford University Press based on a course taught for a few decades in the Department of Linguistics and the Continuing Studies Program. -
Haiyan Lee
Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsModern Chinese literature and popular culture; literature's relations with philosophy, law, and anthropology; cognitive literary studies; affect studies; cognitive cultural studies of gender, sexuality, race, and religion; the nonhuman and environmental humanities
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Joo-Mee Lee
Academic Staff Hourly, Music
BioD.M.A. Boston University
M.M., New England Conservatory
BMus., Royal Academy of Music, London/King's College
Violinist Joo-Mee Lee has taken on several roles in the Department of Music at Stanford University since the fall of 2014. She served as director of the Stanford New Ensemble. As a Lecturer, she teaches courses on Introductory Violin and Professional Development in Music, and also gives individual lessons. She has worked closely with the Stanford Symphony and Philharmonia, and has overseen the annual Concerto Competition.
Previously, Lee served as an artist-in-residence and violin faculty at the University of Denver and at Colorado College. She also taught at Brandeis University, and was a sought-after teacher at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School in Boston.
A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Lee earned her Doctor of Musical Arts from Boston University where she was a Roman Totenberg Scholarship recipient. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled An Analytical Study of Three String Quartets of Bernard Rands.
As a young musician, Lee was chosen to represent South Korea for the Jeunesses Musicales World Orchestra, which performed at the Berlin Philharmonie, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and Amsterdam Concertgebouw. She was a founding member of the Tonos String Quartet which won New England Conservatory’s Honor’s Quartet position. Her quartet took part in the Bank of America Celebrity Series with Rob Capilow, and performed live on Boston's WGBH radio among other concert venues throughout New England. The quartet was invited by the Joong-Ang Daily Newspaper to give a recital at Hoam Art Hall in Seoul, Korea.
Lee has been invited to various music festivals including Aspen, Banff, and Sarasota where she performed solo and chamber recitals. While she was in graduate school, she won a position in the DaVinci Quartet and toured throughout the United States, giving concerts and masterclasses. Concurrently, she won a position in the Colorado Springs Symphony (now Philharmonic), and became a tenured member.
As an avid new music advocate, Lee gave world premieres of chamber music and solo works by many contemporary composers. Among the composers with whom she has closely collaborated are Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, Samuel Adler, and Jennifer Higdon. -
Young Jean Lee
Denning Family Professor of the Arts
BioYOUNG JEAN LEE is a playwright, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by The New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She’s the first Asian-American female playwright to have had a play produced on Broadway. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Her plays have been performed in more than eighty cities around the world and have been published by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, and Theatre Communications Group. Her short films have been presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN Literary Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a Denning Family Professor in the Arts and Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford University.
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Justin Leidwanger
Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans
BioJustin Leidwanger's research focuses on Mediterranean mobilities and connectivity, maritime livelihoods, and their heritage. Ships and ports are central to exploring these themes, providing evidence for the long-term dynamics that shaped coastal communities economically, socially, and politically. He is drawn to the long arc of the Roman Mediterranean, especially its temporal edges, from the emergence of Hellenistic states to the long Late Antiquity and beyond. Through a focus on diverse but co-dependent seaborne interactions that have and continue to define the Mediterranean, this work aligns critical engagement with the past, advocacy for local communities in the present, and sustainable development for the future.
Current collaborative fieldwork in Sardinia with the University of Sassari examines the socio-environmental dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna trap fisheries (tonnare). In Croatia, joint excavation with the Croatian Conservation Institute of a wreck carrying a high-ranking individual and perhaps a goldsmith around 700 CE sheds new light on the transformation of interactions at the end of antiquity (featured in National Geographic, Reuters, and elsewhere). A maritime landscape survey with Dokuz Eylül University in southwest Türkiye explores the impacts of early Hellenistic sociopolitical shifts on local economies and mobilities.
Previously, Justin co-directed investigations (2011-2015) at the Archaic through Late Antique harbors of Burgaz (“Old Knidos”) in Türkiye, and led excavations (2013-2019) of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” off Sicily, which carried 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work in Sicily continues through 3D and other analyses of the assemblage as well as immersive museum-based and other heritage initiatives that link past and present. One facet of this work mobilizes archaeology to understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a new vantage point on socio-environmental systems. Another uses archaeology to foreground heritage activism through the spaces, materialities, and memories of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.
On campus, he teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique archaeology, Mediterranean heritage, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, archaeological theory, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology & Digital Heritage Lab (MEDLab) at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and collaborative resource for shipwreck and harbor archaeology, digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network visualization), and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis, finite element method, experimental archaeology).
Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of various volumes, including Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), Regional Economies in Action (Vienna), and Across the Shore: Integrating Perspective on Maritime Heritage (Springer), he is currently working on two books. The first, Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, examines the interdependence of maritime logistics in Greco-Roman economies, from transport amphora standardization to changes in ship design and port infrastructure. The second, The Tuna Trap, uses the distinctive practices surrounding community fisheries to shed light on the entanglement of human and non-human mobilities across central Mediterranean waters. -
Pavle Levi
Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts
BioPavle Levi is Associate Professor in the Art Department's Film and Media Studies Program.
He is also Faculty Director of Stanford's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).
Prof. Levi's primary areas of research and teaching include: European cinema (emphasis on Eastern Europe), aesthetics and ideology, film and media theory, experimental cinema, intersections of theory and practice.
He is the recipient of the 2011 Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. -
Emily Jane Levine
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History
On Leave from 2026-10-01 To 2027-06-30Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research topics include a genealogy of academic concepts; the contemporary consequences of Germany and America’s divergent paths in knowledge organization; Jews and private philanthropy for scholarship; the historical tension between knowledge-for-its-own sake and applied knowledge; the global transfer of the kindergarten, mass schooling, and higher education; and the history and future of institutional innovation.
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Katerina Levinson
Postdoctoral Scholar, Iberian & Latin American Cultures
BioKaterina Levinson is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford. She received her BA in Spanish and Great Texts (Baylor University), and a Masters in Spanish literature (University of Oxford). She completed her D.Phil from the University of Oxford in Medieval and Modern Languages (Spanish), which draws from research she conducted in Spain. Her doctoral thesis is entitled, "Iconographic Strength: Female Agency through Immaculist Devotion in Calderón’s Marian Autos Sacramentales." Her doctoral research elucidates early modern feminism through a historical, philosophical, and textual framework. Through analysis of the iconographic association of women with Mary's warrior prowess in the conquest of evil, her thesis argues that Calderón complicates notions of gendered virtue by applying virtues to women that were traditionally understood to be reserved for men. She previously held appointments as a Lecturer in ILAC at Stanford and as Stipendiary Lecturer of Medieval Spanish at St. Anne's College, Oxford.
Her current research investigates the promotion of female authority in colonial drama and poetry. Drawing on the intersection of religion, visual art, and literature, she examines how Marian narratives in the Americas functioned as a vehicle for elevating women within the colonial sphere, revealing the ways in which devotional discourse became a site of female agency and cultural negotiation. Her primary research interests lie in early modern Hispanic drama and poetry, Mariology, moral philosophy and literature, women and gender, early modern sensory perception. -
Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
BioYoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in Early Modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining them, particularly in northern German protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science, the history of education, and the history of the book.
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Indra Levy
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy of Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioIndra Levy received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2001. She is the author of Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia, 2006) and editor of Translation in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2009). She has served as Executive Director for the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) since 2010. In 2022, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Irene Hirano Inouye Award from the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for her contributions to Japanese Studies. Her current work focuses on humor in Japanese literature, performance, and translation from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. Her research interests include modern Japanese literature and criticism; critical translation studies; gender and language; modern Japanese performance, especially in the Meiji and Taishō eras; and modern Japanese women’s intellectual history.
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Mark Lewis
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture, Emeritus
BioMark Edward Lewis’s research deals with many aspects of Chinese civilization in the late pre-imperial, early imperial and middle periods (contemporary with the centuries in the West from classical Greece through the early Middle Ages), and with the problem of empire as a political and social form.
His first book, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, studies the emergence of the first Chinese empires by examining the changing forms of permitted violence—warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the units of social organization, and in the defining practices and attitudes of the ruling elites. It thus traces the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city-states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state governed by a supreme autocrat and his agents.
His second book, Writing and Authority in Early China covers the same period from a different angle. It traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, including divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, collective writings of philosophical traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. It shows how these writings in different ways served to form social groups, administer populations, control officials, invent new models of intellectual and political authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs become potent, almost magical, objects.
His third book, The Construction of Space in Early China, examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. It shows how each higher unit—culminating in the empire—claimed to incorporate and transcend the units of the preceding level, while in practice remaining divided and constrained by the survival of the lower units, whose structures and tensions they reproduced. A companion volume, The Flood Myths of Early China, shows how these early Chinese ideas about the constituent elements of an ordered, human space—along with the tensions and divisions therein—were elaborated and dramatized in a set of stories about the re-creation of a structured world from a watery chaos that had engulfed it.
In addition to these specialist monographs, Lewis has written the first three volumes of a six-volume survey of the entire history of imperial China: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, and China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. These volumes serve as introductions to the major periods of Chinese history for non-specialists, and as background readings to introductory surveys. In addition to recounting the major political events, they devote chapters to the most important aspects of the society of each period: geographic background, cities, rural society, kinship, religion, literature, and law.
He has published a new monograph, Honor and Shame in Early China, which traces evolving ideas about honor and shame in the Warring States and early empires in order to understand major developments in the social history of the period. It examines the transformation of elites and the emergence of new groups through scrutinizing differing claims to “honor” (and consequent re-definitions of what was “shameful”) entailed in claiming a public role without necessarily being a noble or an employee of the state.
