School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 41-60 of 96 Results
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Shiven Jain
Undergraduate, Anthropology
Undergraduate, Art & Art History
Undergraduate, International Comparative and Area StudiesBioThroughout my academic journey, I have sought to reimagine education as a collective act of meaning-making rather than a transactional exchange of knowledge. At Indus International School Pune, I collaborated with the English department to redesign our pedagogical framework: students alternated as instructors, teachers assumed the role of facilitators, and classrooms became dialogic spaces for co-construction. What began as a localized experiment now informs learning models across fifteen schools—a testament to the transformative potential of student agency when institutions make space for it.
This commitment to humanized learning permeates my broader work. Through IKKIS: The Podcast, I engage with actors, historians, and critics to examine postcolonial cinema as a site of resistance and reclamation. As the founder of the International Youth Philosophy Initiative (IYPI), I convene interdisciplinary seminars with peers from 37 countries, using literature, aesthetics, and critical philosophy to counter apathy and reanimate ethical inquiry.
Research forms the cornerstone of my intellectual life. For instance, my paper, Reclaiming Sociocultural Agency: The Resurrection of India and Africa in Postcolonial Cinema (The Schola, 2024), investigates narrative reclamation in the aftermath of cultural subjugation. I similarly approach media and cultural criticism as modes of activism: as Director of Content Development at RAYS Magazine, I lead initiatives that interrogate and reframe portrayals of mental health in popular culture, overseeing bimonthly publications rooted in accessibility and literacy. My essays for Film Companion, Youth Ki Awaaz, and Flick Deposit likewise aim to navigate—and, where necessary, dismantle—the ideological scaffolding of mainstream cinema.
To me, leadership and mentorship are natural extensions of intellectual agency. As a Teaching Assistant in English Language and Literature, I have conducted over 150 seminars exploring the intersections of language, politics, and aesthetics—facilitating sessions on figures such as Patrick Chappatte, Audre Lorde, Henrik Ibsen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Across research, pedagogy, media, and mentorship, my work is undergirded by a singular conviction: that education, if it is to remain ethical, must center not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the reclamation of voice, the recognition of alterity, and the radical possibility of collective transformation. -
Richard Klein
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and of Biology, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoevolution of human form and behavior over the past 6-7 million years, with special emphasis on the emergence of fully modern humans in the past 60-50,000 years. Field and lab research in South Africa.
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Matthew Kohrman
Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioMatthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.
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Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Albert Ray Lang Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHer work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic.
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Liisa Malkki
Professor of Anthropology, Emerita
BioLiisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Malkki’s most recent book, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (with Allaine Cerwonka) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her most recent book-length project (based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present) examines the changing interrelationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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Aaron Mascarenhas
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2023
BioI currently practice as a doctor and a medical anthropologist. I completed my MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, India. My experience as a medical practitioner strengthened my conviction that there was much that contemporary medical pedagogy did not teach its students about health, care, and healing. I spent the next few years as a student of the humanities. I obtained a Master's in Liberal Studies from Ashoka University, Sonipat, India, where I studied the relationship between the linguistic and ethical dimensions of medical eponyms named after perpetrators of the Holocaust. At Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, I completed an MA in Philosophy. My final project at Simon Fraser developed a framework to recognise oppression experienced by patients as they attempted to partake in knowledge production during their encounter with biomedical systems.
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Kristin McFadden
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
BioKristin McFadden is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford and a JD Candidate at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. Her research broadly focuses on the socio-legal mechanisms of dispossession and disenfranchisement in the American South. Her dissertation investigates the risk of Black land dispossession in the South Carolina Low Country with particular attention to heirs property as a multifaceted legal and political category. Kristin received her B.A. in Anthropology and African American Studies from Emory University, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and received her M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford. Kristin has previously worked as a political organizer in rural regions of South Carolina and research analyst with the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs.
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Shikha Nehra
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
BioShikha Nehra is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She is conducting dissertation research on the emerging idioms and forms of political belonging in India's north-eastern state of Assam. Her ethnographic and archival research in Assam explores questions of political membership for Muslim communities through its sociocultural terrain, tracing the contribution of different ethnic and literary associations in claiming recognition as indigenous or legal citizens through complex registers of language, identity and belonging. Her broader fields of interest include nationalism, populism, state and sovereignty, bureaucracy, citizenship, subjectivity, and identity-formation.
