School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,151-1,200 of 1,761 Results
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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. -
Leonard Ortolano
UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering in Urban and Regional Planning, Emeritus
BioOrtolano is concerned with environmental and water resources policy and planning. His research stresses environmental policy implementation in developing countries and the role of non-governmental organizations in environmental management. His recent interests center on corporate environmental management.
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Brad Osgood
Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, in Education
BioOsgood is a mathematician by training and applies techniques from analysis and geometry to various engineering problems. He is interested in problems in imaging, pattern recognition, and signal processing.
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Bruce Owen
Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy, Emeritus
BioBruce M. Owen is the Morris M. Doyle Professor in Public Policy, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow, Emeritus, in Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research. For a decade ending in 2015 he was Director of the Stanford Public Policy Program. Professor Owen in 2007 led a successful effort to institute a new masters’ degree program in public policy (MPP) at Stanford. He earlier established an international reputation as an expert on antitrust economics, and was the leading academic student of the economics of mass media markets. He is regarded as a principal architect of the 1974 U.S. Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit that led to the eventual dissolution of the old Bell System, and he testified at the trial of the case in 1981. At Stanford, he has taught courses in economic analysis of law, telecommunications law and policy, and political corruption.
Until 2003, Owen was CEO of Economists Incorporated, a Washington DC consulting firm specializing in antitrust and regulatory policy analysis. Before co-founding Economists Incorporated in 1981, he was the Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and, earlier, of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. He was also a faculty member in the Schools of Business and Law at Duke University and the department of economics at Stanford University. Owen was graduated from Williams College in 1965 with a B.A. in economics and from Stanford in 1970 with a Ph.D., also in economics. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fel-low.
Professor Owen was the author or co-author of numerous articles and eight books, including Television Economics (1974), Economics and Freedom of Expression (1975), The Regulation Game (1978), The Political Economy of Deregulation (1983), Video Economics (1992) and Electric Utility Mergers: Principles of Antitrust Analysis (1994). He was an expert witness in several antitrust and regulatory proceedings. In addition to United States v. AT&T, these included United States Football League v. National Football League, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission review of Southern California Edison’s proposed acquisition of San Diego Gas and Electric Co.
In 1992 Owen headed a World Bank task force that advised Argentina's government in drafting a new antitrust law. He also advised government agencies in Mexico and the U.S. on telecommunications policy and in Peru on antitrust policy. He was a consultant to the World Bank concerning the economic evaluation of legal and judicial reform projects. His most recent book, The Internet Challenge to Television, was published by Harvard University Press in 1999.
In recent years, Professor Owen has turned to the economic analysis of Madisonian remedies for the adverse effects of lawful political corruption in the U.S. He published “’To Promote the General Welfare' - Addressing Political Corruption in America,” British Journal of Ameri-can Legal Studies, in 2016. He is now working on a book with the working title “Madison’s Missing Branch,” a draft is available at SSRN. -
Djordje Padejski
Associate Director, JSK Journalism Fellowships
Current Role at StanfordAssociate Director | Lecturer
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Amado Padilla
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Vida Jacks Professor of Education
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent projects include: (a) the development of models of ethnic identity that incorporate social cognition theory and social identity; (b)acculturation stress and mental health status across three generations of Latinos; (c) home, school and community protective factors that empower Latino students to succeed academically; (d) learning of Mandarin by high school students in summer intensive programs vs. students in regular high school world language classes; and (e) student language and academic content learning in a Mandarin/English dual language immersion program.
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Stephen Palumbi
Jane and Marshall Steel Jr. Professor of Marine Sciences, Professor of Oceans and of Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe're interested in ecological, evolutionary, and conservation questions related to marine (and sometimes terrestrial) organisms and ecosystems. We use evolutionary genetics and molecular ecology techniques, and our fieldwork takes us all around the world. Currently, we're studying coral diversity, the adaptive potential of corals in response to climate change, the movement of organisms between marine reserves, genetic changes in abalone in response to environmental.
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David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Rights, Social Justice, Ethics, Race and Ethnicity
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Jennifer Pan
Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Sociology
BioJennifer Pan studies political communication, digital media, and authoritarian politics, with a focus on China. She is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication, and, by courtesy, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University, where she is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Using experimental and computational methods with large-scale data on political activity, she examines how technology structures censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation, and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. She is the author of Welfare for Autocrats (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in journals including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Science, and Nature.
She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government. -
Timothy Pantoja
Lecturer, African and African American Studies
BioTimothy Pantoja is the Mellon Fellow of the Humanities at Stanford University and a Lecturer in the Department of African and African American Studies. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was the Medical Humanities Fellow at New York University where he taught courses on the ways the humanities rethinks ideas and practices of healing, recovery, and wholeness. His research explores the ways Black and Caribbean literature and art theorize reflection, doubt, and what it means to participate with the objects that mediate our encounters with each other and a shareable world. His current book project, Scenes of Reflection: Compelling Insinuations, Empathy, and Absorption, analyzes portrayals of reflection in black modernist art and literature alongside the aesthetic evolutions of empathy as a mode of perception. This book reveals how artists such as Henry Tanner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Claude McKay engaged contemporary aesthetic theories on empathy as kinesthesia and synesthesia to show the ways reflection is an act of relation and participation. The aim of this project is to show resonances and connections between these portrayals of reflection during the black modernist period with current aesthetic theories on haptic and synesthetic modes of beholding and reading in Black studies. He also holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School which generated writings on the relation between literature and religion. His engagement with religion and art is leading to a second project, entitled, Yet Do I Marvel: Doubt, Curiosity, and Adolescence, which analyzes the ways African American and Caribbean literature, visual art, and film depict doubt as a catalyst for creativity and critique, opening new spaces to (re)consider the fraught intersections between Black religion and artistic expression.
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Grant Parker
Associate Professor of Classics, of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioGrant Parker joined Stanford in 2006, having taught previously at Duke University. He has long researched and taught Latin literature and Roman imperial culture, e.g. The Making of Roman India (2008). Other publications include The Agony of Asar: a former slave's defence of slavery, 1742 (2001) and, as editor, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (2017). Since 2025 he has also taught African Studies in the newly constituted Department of African and African American Studies. As a comparative global humanist, his interest in monuments, collective memory and their media is expressed by several articles on obelisks and statues. Another ongoing theme is enslavement and its aftermaths, ancient and modern. Current work engages monument-mindedness in Southern Africa as well as the global reception of Virgil's poetry. His many roles on campus have included the Stanford Archaeology Center, the Center for African Studies, and Residential Education.
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Patricia Parker
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, English
BioPatricia Parker received her M.A. in English at the University of Toronto and taught for three years in Tanzania, whose President Julius Nyerere also translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili. After teaching at the University of East Africa, she completed her Ph.D. at Yale, in Comparative Literature, and taught for 11 years at the University of Toronto. First invited to Stanford as a Visiting Professor in 1986, she came to Stanford permanently in 1988 as a Professor in both English and Comparative Literature. She has also taught as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of the core faculty at the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University, 1998). She is the author of four books (Inescapable Romance, a study of romance from Ariosto to Wallace Stevens; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; Shakespeare from the Margins; and Shakespearean Intersections) and co-editor of five collections of essays on criticism, theory, and cultural studies, including Shakespeare and the Question of Theory and Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. She has lectured widely in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and other parts of the world, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other universities; as Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, Shakespeare's Birthday lecturer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Northrop Frye Professor lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Paul Gottschalk lecturer at Cornell University; and has served on the Advisory Board of the English Institute. In 2003-4, she organized an international conference and public festival at Stanford devoted to “Shakespeare in Asia.” She has also worked with students to create performance-based programs in the community. She taught courses on Shakespeare (including Global Shakespeares), the Bible and Literature, Epic and Empire and other topics. In addition to books-in-progress on Shakespeare, rhetoric, race, and gender, she is the General Editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, which will be released online as a global reference work free to anyone in the world with access to the internet.
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Quinn Mitsuko Parker
Ph.D. Student in Oceans, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsQuinn Parker studies social-ecological dynamics of small-scale fisheries, and their ties to gender equity, food security, and food sovereignty. She examines the cultural, socio-economic, and historical drivers that impact SSF governance, and how these governance models in turn affect resilience of and access to blue food systems.
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Jonathan Payne
Dorrell William Kirby Professor, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy goal in research is to understand the interaction between environmental change and biological evolution using fossils and the sedimentary rock record. How does environmental change influence evolutionary and ecological processes? And conversely, how do evolutionary and ecological changes affect the physical environment? I work primarily on the marine fossil record over the past 550 million years.
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Roy Pea
Director, H-STAR, David Jacks Professor of Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science
Current Research and Scholarly Interestslearning sciences focus on advancing theories, research, tools and social practices of technology-enhanced learning of complex domains
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Antonia Michelle Rosen Peacocke
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
BioAntonia Peacocke works on philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics, including philosophy of literature. As of December 2025, her monograph Mental Means is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Before coming to Stanford, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.
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Scott Pearson
Professor at the Food Research Institute, Emeritus
BioScott Pearson taught economic development and international trade in the Food Research Institute. Pearson came to Stanford in 1968 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1974 and to Professor in 1980. He served as the Food Research Institute’s Associate Director (1977-1984) and Director (1992-1996). Pearson became Professor Emeritus in 2002. In retirement, Pearson has lectured on 67 travel/study programs for the Stanford Alumni Association and 121 educational travel trips in total, visiting all seven continents.
Pearson grew up in Baraboo, Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in American history in 1961. Between 1961 and 1963, he was one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers – serving as a secondary school teacher in Northern Nigeria. Pearson’s marriage to Sandra Anderson in Lagos, Nigeria in 1962 was the first wedding in the Peace Corps.
Pearson decided to pursue a career in academia, specializing in international development. He spent one year in Bologna, Italy and another in Washington, D.C. to earn a Master of Arts degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1965. Pearson then earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard University in 1968. He wrote his dissertation on the impact of petroleum exports on Nigerian development under the direction of Albert Hirschman and revised his thesis for his first book, Petroleum and the Nigerian Economy (Stanford University Press, 1970).
Pearson began his empirical research in Nigeria (1961-69) and Ghana (1970-78). He later focused on Indonesia (1979-2004), Portugal (1981-95), and Kenya (1986-96). Pearson’s professional work abroad combined research (in collaboration with local university or government researchers), teaching (of short courses to transfer methods of field research and analysis), and policy analysis (to provide policy advice to government officials).
During most years, Pearson taught during two Stanford quarters and spent five months working abroad. In 1978, Pearson received the Dean’s Award for Teaching in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
Pearson’s research focused on food and agricultural policy analysis, especially links among price, macroeconomic, and investment policies. He also worked on food price stabilization, trade and exchange rate policies, and social benefit-cost analysis. Wally Falcon, Peter Timmer, and Pearson collaborated for many years in Indonesia and co-authored Food Policy Analysis (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), which received the Award for Professional Excellence, Quality of Communication in 1984 from the American Agricultural Economics Association and was translated into five languages.
In 1982, Eric Monke and Pearson began developing the Policy Analysis Matrix (PAM) approach to integrate policy and project analysis. PAM is a marriage of benefit-cost analysis and economic policy analysis in a matrix framework. Monke and Pearson explained the PAM approach in The Policy Analysis Matrix for Agricultural Development (Cornell University Press, 1989). Most of the 12 books that Pearson co-authored are applications of the PAM. Pearson presented PAM short-courses in China, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Thailand, Washington (the World Bank), and Zimbabwe.
Pearson was a member of numerous university committees and served on the Board of Trustees Committee on Finance and Administration and the Faculty Senate. Pearson and his wife, Sandra, were Faculty Residents in undergraduate dormitories at Stanford for five years (Serra House, 1968-1969 and 1977-1978, Madera House, 1978-1980, and Potter House, 1983-1984). Sandra Pearson later served as Principal of Palo Alto High School (1987-1994 and 2002-2004), and in 2004 she won the Tall Tree Award, sponsored by the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly.
