School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 801-900 of 1,362 Results
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Jamie Meltzer
Professor of Art and Art History
BioProfessor Jamie Meltzer teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film. His feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. Shifted Landscapes, a documentary feature in production, presents a mosaic of stories depicting the environmental, cultural, and psychological landscapes of California amidst the ongoing climate crisis. His short documentary, not even for a moment do things stand still, premiered at SXSW in March 2022, winning a Special Jury Mention in Visual Reflection. The film provides an observational glimpse into a COVID-19 art installation, dropping into intimate moments of people honoring their loved ones, and interrogating the role of mourning and closure during an unfolding tragedy. It was published as a New York Times Op-Doc in April 2022. Huntsville Station, a short documentary film directed with Chris Filippone, was featured as a New York Times Op-Docs and premiered at Berlinale and SXSW in 2020. The film observes the scene at a bus station - where dozens of inmates just released on parole take in their first moments of freedom before taking the bus home. True Conviction (broadcast on Independent Lens in May 2018), a co-production of ITVS and the recipient of a Sundance Institute grant and a MacArthur grant, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Mention in the Best Documentary Feature category. Informant (2012), about a revolutionary activist turned FBI informant, was released in theaters in the US and Canada in Fall 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith. Previous films include: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broadcast, 2007), an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction.
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Jisha Menon
Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioJisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies and Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Comparative Literature. She is Chair of the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Previously, she served as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, Denning Faculty Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, and Faculty Director of the Center for South Asia.
Menon is a scholar of comparative dramatic literature and transnational performance studies whose work explores the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Her scholarship takes performance as a generative analytical category for understanding how powerful political and cultural formations are inhabited, negotiated, and contested in everyday life. Her current book project, Law, Affect, and the Performance of Personhood (under contract with Cambridge University Press), explores how legal practices produce a particular liberal conception of the person and how this conception differs from more plural and discontinuous understandings of personhood. It argues that attending to the performed and fictive constitution of the person in law reveals the artifice -- and the aesthetics -- at the heart of jurisprudence.
Menon's books and edited volumes explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her latest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, the book delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to rethink political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.)
Menon's university leadership has been recognized with Stanford’s inaugural Outstanding Leader Award from the Faculty Women’s Forum. She has served on the Stanford Faculty Senate as well as on the Steering Committee for the Faculty Senate. Her contributions to the field include leadership in Performance Studies International, as well as service on the editorial boards of leading journals and book series.
In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Menon is a director, actor, and playwright. Her co-authored play, City of Gardens, (with Abhishek Majumdar) was published by Dawran Press in 2026. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. -
Richard Meyer
Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History
BioAreas of Specialization:
20th-century American art and visual culture -
Ana Raquel Minian
Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resources Studies
BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.
Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s work in immigration and ethnic history; the Western Association of Women Historians’ Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best monograph in the field of history by a member; the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for best book in humanist sociology; and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history by the Organization of American Historians and received an honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award given to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.
Minian's second book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention (Viking Press, forthcoming, April 2024) reveals the history of the immigrant detention system from its inception in the 1800s to the present. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, the book gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of a Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these “black sites” exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn’t have to be like this, and a better way might be possible.
Additionally, Minian has published articles in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.
In 2020, Minian was awarded with the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Minian's third book project, "No Man’s Lands: A New History of Immigration Restriction," examines how during the late Cold War and its aftermath, U.S. officials created new spaces and territories designed to prevent Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants from entering the United States. Rather than a thought-out and coherent project, these various spatial enterprises were designed haphazardly in response to particular incidents and migrations. -
Tatiana Monserrat Miranda-Benavides
Ph.D. Student in Iberian & Latin American Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
Ph.D. Minor, PhilosophyBioResearch traces continuities between early modern Iberian literature and twentieth-century Latin American literature, using philosophy as a methodological framework. Past work has moved across ethics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric, applied to a range of texts spanning the medieval and early modern Iberian periods through the modern Latin American novel.
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Mercedes Montemayor Elosua
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
BioMercedes Montemayor is a Mexican composer, multidisciplinary artist, and doctor of musical arts candidate at Stanford University. Her works manifest as electronic and electroacoustic music, sound Art, sound installation, and performance Art. She composes multichannel pieces for the stage and the listening room at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), from 3-7th order ambisonics. Also a film lover, she actively participates in the sound design and compositions of short films— and is now entering the world of scoring the feature film with LOUWRIEN WIJERS: from Competition to Compassion (2025). Her career launched with her collaboration with Mexican textile artist Miriam Medrez, in her intermedia installation Jardín Onírico (2022), followed by an internship at an Architectural Acoustics firm, and a performance in Mutek (2023) in Museo Anahuacall, in Mexico City with her debut album Volumina (2023).She studied Audio Engineering at Tecnológico De Monterrey and is in love with the process of mixing and mastering her work. Recently she's been reading Kierkegaard which is a considerable influence in her upcoming works, and continues to experiment with space to voice her experience as an experiencer.
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Yumi Moon
Associate Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI joined the department in 2006 after I completed my dissertation on the last phase of Korean reformist movements and the Japanese colonization of Korea between 1896 and 1910. In my dissertation, I revisited the identity of the pro-Japanese collaborators, called the Ilchinhoe, and highlighted the tensions between their populist orientation and the state-centered approach of the Japanese colonizers. Examining the Ilchinhoe’s reformist orientation and their dissolution by the Japanese authority led me to question what it meant to be collaborators during the period and what their tragic history tells us about empire as a political entity. I am currently working on a book manuscript centered on the theme of collaboration and empire, notably in relation to the recent revisionist assessments of empire. My next research will extend to the colonial period of Korea after the annexation and will examine what constituted colonial modernity in people’s everyday lives and whether the particulars of modernity were different in colonial and non-colonial situations. To explore these questions, I plan to look at the history of movie theaters in East Asia between 1890 and 1945, a subject which will allow me to study the interactions between the colonial authority, capitalists and consumers, as well as to look at the circulation of movies as consumed texts.
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Franco Moretti
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor, Emeritus
BioAuthor of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), The Bourgeois (2013), and Distant Reading (2013). Chief editor of The Novel (2006). Has founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Writes often for New Left Review, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
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Ian Morris
Jean and Rebecca Willard Endowed Professor of Classics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsUsing long-term history to identify the big trends that have shaped society across the last 100,000 years, and analyzing how those trends might play out in the future.
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Paula M. L. Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioMoya is currently the Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is on leave for AY 2025-2026.
She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).
Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.
At Stanford, Moya has served as the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).
Moya was a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.
Moya has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Ford Foundation posdoctoral fellow. She has also been the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. -
Michaela Mross
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
BioMichaela Mross specializes in Japanese Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on Sōtō Zen, Buddhist rituals, sacred music, as well as manuscript and print culture in premodern Japan. She has written numerous articles on kōshiki 講式 (Buddhist ceremonials) and co-edited a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on kōshiki. Her first book, Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of Kōshiki in Japanese Sōtō Zen, is forthcoming with the Kuroda Series of University of Hawai’i Press. She is currently working on a monograph on eisanka 詠讃歌 (Buddhist hymns) and lay Buddhist choirs in contemporary Zen Buddhism. This project will showcase how music played a vital role in the modernization of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism in the last seventy years.
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Thomas Mullaney
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.
His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. -
Carolyn Springer
Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Emerita
BioProfessor Carolyn Springer came to Stanford in 1985 after receiving a Ph.D. in Italian language and literature from Yale University. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies / Villa I Tatti, the Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her research has focused primarily on Renaissance and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history. She has published articles and reviews in Annali d’italianistica, Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature, Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, Forum Italicum, GRADIVA: International Journal of Literature, The International Journal of the Humanities, Italian Quarterly, The Italianist, Italica (Journal of the American Association of Italian Studies), Modern Language Studies, NEMLA Italian Studies, Quaderni d’italianistica, Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Stanford Italian Review, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, Woman’s Art Journal, The Wordsworth Circle, and Yale Italian Studies. Professor Springer’s books include The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1987; reprinted in paperback, 2010); Immagini del Novecento italiano (Macmillan, coeditors Pietro Frassica and Giovanni Pacchiano); and History and Memory in European Romanticism (special issue of Stanford Literature Review). Her latest book, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, appeared in 2010 with University of Toronto Press (reprinted in paperback, 2013).
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Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
Iranian Studies Student Assistant, Iranian StudiesBioAshkan Nazari
Degrees / Education
M.A., Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran, 2016
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran, 2012
A Kurdish-Iranian musician, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer, and researcher, Ashkan is currently a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology and a doctoral certificate student in composition at Stanford University. Ashkan’s compositional work draws on the Iranian dastgāh system and Kurdish maqām idioms, while his practice at Stanford engages contemporary and experimental compositional approaches.
Ashkan’s more than 15-year research career has centered on Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. At Stanford, his work explores intersections between music and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam, and Kurdish identity. He is also interested in developing decolonial ethnographic approaches to maqām as a cultural–musical practice and concept, particularly in relation to ethnicity and racism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with two titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music. His articles have appeared in leading Iranian journals, and he has presented his research at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan has also taught Iranian music theory and directed Iranian ensembles, and has instructed setār performance and the analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively. -
Alexander Nemerov
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of English
BioA distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. Revered for his breadth of scholarship and celebrated for his eloquent public speaking, Nemerov inspires audiences with his belief in the affirming and transfiguring force of art.
An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. His conjuring of a lost world of shade and sun has been praised by Annie Proulx ("deeply beautiful”, “astonishingly tender”, “one of the richest books ever to come my way") and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”).
Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor, was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov’s initial books include Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus; The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824; and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.
Nemerov, an engaging, eloquent speaker, gave the 2007 Andrew Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2017, he delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, becoming the first scholar to deliver them with a focus on American art. He has also published two exhibition catalogues: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, the companion to a National Museum of American Art exhibition of that name and Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic.
After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors. -
Reviel Netz
Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy and Professor, by courtesy, of Philosophy and of History
BioNetz's main field is the history of pre-modern mathematics. His research involves the wider issues of the history of cognitive practices, e.g. visual culture, the history of the book, and literacy and numeracy. His books from Cambridge University Press include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: a Study in Cognitive History (1999, Runciman Award), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics: From Problems to Equations (2004), and Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009).
He is also the author of the translation and commentary of the works of Archimedes, also with CUP, a three-volume work of which the first has appeared, The Two Books on Sphere and Cylinder (2004). Together with Nigel Wilson, he prepares the edition of the recently rediscovered Archimedes Palimpsest (evidence from which already gave rise to two major discoveries: a text showing actual infinity in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2001-2002, and a text showing, possibly, combinatorics in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2004.) Two volumes, Transcription and Critical Edition, are forthcoming from the British Academy, of which the transcription is already available online. His popular book on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, The Archimedes Codex, (co-authored with William Noel, Neumann Prize) was published by Widenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, and is translated into 20 languages.
Related to his research in cognitive history is his interest in ecological history, and he has published Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2004, finalist for PEN award). Reviel Netz is also a poet (Adayin Bahuc, 1999 Shufra: Tel Aviv, AMOS prize), one of a group of Hebrew poets active today whose work revives formal verse and he is the co-author, together with his wife, the Israeli author Maya Arad, of a collection of essays on Israeli literature, Positions of Stress (Meqom Hata'am, 2008 Axuzat Bayit: Tel Aviv). -
Quyen Nguyen-Hoang
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2022
BioQuyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Hà Nội.
Her recent translations include the English translation of Chronicles of a Village, a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện (Yale University Press 2024), and the Vietnamese translation of Samuel Caleb Wee’s poetry collection https://everything.is/ (AJAR Press 2024).
While a curator at Sàn Art, she wrote Masked Force (2022), a bilingual book interleaved with the war photographs of Võ An Khánh. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in Poetry, Jacket2, Modern Poetry in Translation and other venues. -
Andrea Nightingale
Professor of Classics, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am completing a book entitled "Eros and Epiphany: Plato on the Soul's Ascent to Divine Beings"
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Miguel Novelo Cruz
Lecturer, Art & Art History
BioMiguel Novelo (he/him/el) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic video art, technoshammanic installations, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computational virus-like software.
Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. -
Ethan Nowak
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhilosophy of language, social and political philosophy, East Asian philosophy
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Josiah Ober
Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Philosophy
BioJosiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. His primary appointment is in Political Science; he holds a secondary appointment in the Classics and courtesy appointments in Philosophy and the Hoover Institution. His most recent books are The Greeks and the Rational: The discovery of practical reason (University of CaliforniaPress 2022) and Demopolis: Democracy before liberalism in theory and practice Cambridge University Press 2017). His ongoing work focuses on rationality (ancient and modern), the theory and practice of democracy, and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers address AI ethics, socio-political systems, economic growth and inequality, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.
He is author or co-author of about 100 articles and chapters (many available on his Academia.edu page) and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), Athenian Legacies 2005), Democracy and Knowledge (2008), and The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, UC-Irvine, and UC-Berkeley. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006). -
Kathryn Meyer Olivarius
Associate Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an historian of nineteenth-century America, interested primarily in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. My research seeks to understand how epidemic yellow fever disrupted Deep Southern society. Nearly every summer, this mosquito-borne virus killed up to ten percent of the urban population. But it also generated culture and social norms in its fatal wake. Beyond the rigid structures of race and unfreedom in Deep Southern society, I argue there was alternate, if invisible, hierarchy at work, with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people awaiting their brush with yellow fever languishing in social and professional purgatory. About half of all people died in the acclimating process.
In New Orleans, alleged-imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a justification for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy where certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relations, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently-immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, pro-slavery, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation-status, I argue, played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in antebellum New Orleans.
Most of all, disease provided the tacit justification for who did what work during cotton and sugar production, becoming the essence of an increasingly elaborate and tortuous justification for widespread and permanent black slavery. In the Deep Southern view, only enslaved black people could survive work like cane cutting, swamp clearing, and cotton picking. In fact, proslavery theorists argued, black slavery was positively natural, even humanitarian, for it protected the health of whites—and thus the nation writ large—insulating them from diseased-labor and spaces that would kill them.
By fusing health with capitalism in my forthcoming book Necropolis, I will present a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society.
I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West. -
Stephen Orgel
Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Emeritus
BioStephen Orgel has published widely on the political and historical aspects of Renaissance literature, theater, art history and the history of the book. His work is interdisciplinary, and is increasingly concerned with the patronage system, the nature of representation, and performance practice in the Renaissance. His most recent book is Imagining Shakespeare (2003), and he is the author of The Authentic Shakespeare (2002), Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge, 1996), The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, 1975), Inigo Jones (London and Berkeley, 1973, in collaboration with Sir Roy Strong), and The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). He has edited Ben Jonson's masques, Christopher Marlowe's poems and translations, the Oxford Authors John Milton, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in The Oxford Shakespeare, Trollope's Lady Anna, and Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence and The Reef in the Oxford World's Classics. He is the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, and of the new Pelican Shakespeare. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowships, and ACLS Fellowships; he has been a Getty Fellow, a visiting fellow at New College, Oxford, and most recently the Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Megan Otani
Affiliate, Linguistics
BioUW Linguistics '26 | Research Assistant @ SPOG Lab
