School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 91-100 of 156 Results
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Mandla T. Msipa
Master of Arts Student in Communication, admitted Autumn 2023
BioMandla Msipa (he/him) is an undergraduate at Stanford University pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science and a Coterminal Master of Arts in Communications (Media Studies) .
A Zimbabwean-American, Mandla spent 13 years in Harare under the SJET school system and attained A-Level qualifications from Cambridge International. After graduating, he worked as a Junior Master at St. John’s College, Harare, teaching in the History and English departments. After his freshman year, Mandla interned in the DC office of US Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA), where he worked on education and labor policy, communications, and constituent services.
At Stanford, Mandla is a Research Assistant in the Political Science Department, where he studies political demonization in media and legislative discourse. He serves as the Financial Manager at Hammarskjöld House and is an Admit Weekend Coordinator for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. He also served on the Undergraduate Senate in 2024, advocating for housing accessibility and student co-operatives.
Mandla’s research interests lie at the intersection of politics, education, and digital media. He is particularly focused on K-12 governance structures, teacher-student relationship dynamics at the system level, digital literacy education, and the role of internet exposure in the early formation of political ideology. Additionally, he is interested in how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be leveraged for democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa. -
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. -
Nathaniel Persily
James B. McClatchy Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Communication and of Political Science
BioNate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. He also holds appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Professor Persily’s work focuses on two distinct areas: the Law of Democracy and Governance of Technology. He is coauthor with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson of the casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), which addresses issues such as voting rights, political party regulation, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the nonpartisan Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy. He is coeditor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020), and Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science (Cambridge Press, 2026). He is also co-editor of the Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024) with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland and Condoleeza Rice. Professor Persily cochairs the Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
