School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-10 of 45 Results

  • James L. Adams

    James L. Adams

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI have for some time been working on two books. The working title for one is Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, and it concerns the benefits of working with the hands. The other has a working title of Homo Demi Sapiens, and is about the balance of creativity and control in very large groups (societies, religions, etc.). I am also revising a book entitled The Building of an Engineer, which I wrote for my aging mother and self-published. It is somewhat autobiographical, and although it is available on Amazon, I do not consider it quite ready for public reading.

  • Jeremy Bailenson

    Jeremy Bailenson

    Thomas More Storke Professor, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Education
    On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024

    BioJeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication, Professor (by courtesy) of Education, Professor (by courtesy) Program in Symbolic Systems, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication for over a decade. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. He spent four years at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

    Bailenson studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, in particular how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. His lab builds and studies systems that allow people to meet in virtual space, and explores the changes in the nature of social interaction. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. In 2020, IEEE recognized his work with “The Virtual/Augmented Reality Technical Achievement Award”.

    He has published more than 200 academic papers, spanning the fields of communication, computer science, education, environmental science, law, linguistics, marketing, medicine, political science, and psychology. His work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for over 25 years.

    His first book Infinite Reality, co-authored with Jim Blascovich, emerged as an Amazon Best-seller eight years after its initial publication, and was quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court. His new book, Experience on Demand, was reviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Nature, and The Times of London, and was an Amazon Best-seller.

    He has written opinion pieces for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, PBS NewsHour, Wired, National Geographic, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, TechCrunch, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and has produced or directed six Virtual Reality documentary experiences which were official selections at the Tribeca Film Festival. His lab has exhibited VR in hundreds of venues ranging from The Smithsonian to The Superbowl.

  • Adam Banks

    Adam Banks

    Professor of Education

    BioCommitted teacher. Midnight Believer. A Slow Jam in a Hip Hop world. Cerebral and silly, outgoing and a homebody. Vernacular and grounded but academic and idealistic too. Convinced that Donny Hathaway is the most compelling artist of the entire soul and funk era, and that we still don't give Patrice Rushen enough love. I'm a crate digger, and DJ with words and ideas, and I believe that the people, voices and communities we bring with us to Stanford are every bit as important as those with which we engage here at Stanford.

    Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, I come to Stanford from the University of Kentucky, where I served on the faculty of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies and prior to that, from Syracuse University, as a member of the faculty of the Writing Program. In addition to these appointments I served as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas and, jointly with Andrea Lunsford, as the Rocky Gooch Visiting Professor for the Bread Loaf School of English.

    My scholarship lies at the intersections of writing, rhetoric and technology issues; my specialized interests include African American rhetoric, community literacy, digital rhetorics and digital humanities. My most recent book is titled Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, and my current digital/book project is titled Technologizing Funk/Funkin Technology: Critical Digital Literacies and the Trope of the Talking Book.

  • Thomas Byers

    Thomas Byers

    Entrepreneurship Professor in the School of Engineering

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsApplied ethics, responsible innovation, and global entrepreneurship education (see http://peak.stanford.edu).

  • Angele Christin

    Angele Christin

    Associate Professor of Communication and, by courtesy, of Sociology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAngèle Christin studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices.

    Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Angèle shows how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. She discussed it on the New Books Network podcast.

    In a related study, she analyzed the construction, institutionalization, and reception of predictive algorithms in the U.S. criminal justice system, building on her previous work on the determinants of criminal sentencing in French courts.

    Her new project examines the paradoxes of algorithmic labor through a study of influencers and influencer marketing on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

  • Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of Political Science

    BioProfessor Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) Professor Dupuy is by courtesy a Professor of Political Science.

    In his book The Mechanization of the Mind, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explains how the founders of cybernetics laid the foundations not only for cognitive science, but also artificial intelligence, and foreshadowed the development of chaos theory, complexity theory, and other scientific and philosophical breakthroughs.

  • Paul N. Edwards

    Paul N. Edwards

    Senior Lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society

    BioI'm Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. I also co-direct the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative with Prof. Steve Luby.

    I'm Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan, where I worked for almost 20 years in the School of Information, the Dept. of History, and the STS Program. I taught previously at Stanford from 1992-1998 in various capacities, mainly in the Science, Technology & Society Program that I now direct.

    I study the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures, especially climate knowledge systems. My books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001, co-edited with Clark Miller). I'm academic editor of the MIT Press book series Infrastructures.

    From 2018-2021, I served as one of 234 Lead Authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I (Physical Sciences), released in August 2021.

  • Paula Findlen

    Paula Findlen

    Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian

    BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.

    My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.

    Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand.

  • Alice Fox

    Alice Fox

    Lecturer, Science, Technology and Society

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsInterplay of video games and society, ethics, and philosophy of technology