School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-100 of 261 Results
-
Oluwakemisola Adeusi
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Political ScienceBioOluwakemisola "Kemi" (pronouns: she/her) received her B.A. in German from the University of Ibadan in 2011. She completed her M.A. in German at The University of Alabama in 2022 and is now a doctoral candidate in German studies at Stanford.
Her dissertation, “Representations of Inter- and Intra-Migrant Interactions in Contemporary German Literature,” examines how German-language texts represent complex relationships among migrant communities, moving beyond simplistic binaries of “host” and “immigrant” identity. -
Hongmin Ahn
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2026
BioHongmin Ahn is an incoming Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at Stanford University. He holds a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Religion from Bard College. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Hongmin focuses on modern transnational religions in Korea and Japan, with a particular focus on Zainichi—the Korean diaspora in post-colonial Japan. His research explores the transnational networks of Zainichi religions that connect Korea, Japan, and the global Korean diaspora. Before coming to Stanford, he was an IAFOR Global Fellow at the Osaka School of International Public Policy, the University of Osaka.
-
Marlon Ariyasinghe
Ph.D. Student in Theater and Performance Studies, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesBioMarlon Ariyasinghe (he/him) is a writer, editor, theatre practitioner and researcher from Sri Lanka. He is a master’s graduate in English from the University of Geneva and received his BA (honors) in English from the University of Peradeniya. He was the co-editor of Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts (VIII, Issue 2), a special edition on Sri Lankan Combative Art, Angampora. He was the Senior Assistant Editor at Himal Southasian, a regional magazine of politics and culture. He served as the secretary of the Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has organized multiple international literary conferences from 2010-2023.
His rapportage has been featured in Reuters, DW, BBC World, WION, The Washington Post, NPR, and other outlets worldwide. Marlon has directed plays for Emmet Theatre Company in Geneva and published a collection of poetry Froteztology in 2011. Marlon’s research interests include Southasian theatre and historiography, performing blackness, Southasian antiblackness, cognition and performance, theatre pedagogy, and decolonizing actor-training methodologies. His research has been published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research International, Mise en Abyme: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Arts, and Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth.
Selected directing credits include: Exorcism (2025), Twelfth Night (2019), The Clean House (2015), Antigonick (2014), and Rizana (2013).
He tweets at @MarlonAriy
https://marlonariyasinghe.com/ -
Mariam Atallah
Master of Fine Arts Student, Documentary Film and Video
BioMariam Atallah is a photographer and filmmaker rooted in Cairo, Egypt, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in filmmaking and first discovered her creative spark through the city’s lively streets. Her work examines connections and tensions between Egypt and the United States, exploring how political, social, and personal systems intersect across both contexts. She has been a Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow at Kartemquin Films, and her films have screened at the Toronto Arab Film Festival and the Egyptian American Film Festival.
-
Mathew Ayodele
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesBioMathew Ayodele is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. His research interest focuses on the Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of Africa, particularly the religious, gender, and medical history in West Africa. He is primarily interested in interrogating the social history of medicine, medical pluralism, Christian missionaries' interplay, and reproductive health in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Mathew is also interested in women's sports history within the context of gender, religion, and media politics in the late 20th century in Nigeria.
-
Bethany D. Bass
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2024
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Summer 2026
Graduate Program Assistant, GSE Centers and Programs
Research Assistant, GSE Centers and ProgramsBioBethany D. Bass is a PhD student studying Race, Inequality, Language and Education & History of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her work focuses on the relationship between historically Black schools and Black communities, chronicling Black education in South Dallas, Texas, from the late 1930s to the present. Their work uses Black geographic thought, digital humanities, and oral history to listen to how Black elders and young people create sites of Black livingness (McKittrick 2021, Quashie 2021) and learning inside and outside of formal school settings.
Their scholarship is supported by the EDGE: Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Fellowship and The Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) through the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education. -
Farah Bazzi
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioFarah Bazzi was born in Lebanon and raised in The Netherlands. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Farah’s work attempts to bridge both Mediterranean and Atlantic history by focusing on how objects, people, and imaginations moved between the Ottoman world, Morocco, Iberia, and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, Farah’s research interests include environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. In her dissertation, Farah looks at the expulsion of the moriscos and their presence in the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire from a socio-environmental perspective. In addition to this, Farah is interested the construction of Al-Andalus as an aesthetically appealing, pursuable, and transplantable natural and racialized landscape in Spanish, Arabic, and Ottoman sources.
Currently, Farah is one of the project founders and managers of the ‘Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic’ project sponsored by CESTA, the History Department, and the Division of Languages and Cultures. She is also the graduate coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford and the Graduate Student Counselor (director) on the board of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). -
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioSinead is an ABD PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and is expecting to complete her dissertation in 2024. Her research investigates ancient Roman sexual culture and where it shows up in the landscape. It focuses on displays of sexuality that do not match up to any social or political identities, including statues of Priapus, emperors portrayed as sexual aggressors and agricultural language adopted as sexual slang.
Sinead comes from Auckland, New Zealand, where she received her M.A. with First Class Honours. Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, she argued that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
Sinead is also interested in the Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow, she is developing an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon. -
Alina Bykova
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
BioAlina is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European History. Her research interests include Arctic and Soviet environmental history with a focus on energy and industry. Alina is writing her dissertation on the history of energy and extraction on Svalbard, Norway. She also works as a research associate and editor-in-chief at The Arctic Institute, an interdisciplinary think tank.
Alina earned her masters in European and Russian Affairs from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2019. Her masters thesis was about the rise and fall of Soviet mining settlements on Svalbard. Prior to her work in academia, she completed a Bachelor of Journalism at Ryerson University and worked as a breaking news reporter at the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper. -
Marina Del Cassio
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
BioMarina Del Cassio is a Ph.D. student in the Stanford Department of History and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is currently working on a legal and cultural history of wildfire and land burning in long-nineteenth-century California. Her interests more broadly lie in American legal history, indigenous history, environmental history, and history of capitalism. Before coming to Stanford, she represented tribes and municipalities in environmental law matters and clerked at the Ninth Circuit and the California Supreme Court.
-
Yan Chang
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2021
BioYan Chang is a Ph.D. student in modern and contemporary East Asian literatures, cultures, and media. His research interests currently center on trans-linguality, trans-culture, and trans-nationality in post-Cold War Japanophone literature. His academic concerns also include visuality and modernity of modern Japanese literature in the Taisho period as well as Shanghai urbanization and the concomitant media representations in the 1990s. Before joining Stanford, Yan received a joint B.A. in Economics and Japanese from Shanghai International Studies University, an M.A. in Japanese Culture Studies from Nagoya University, and an M.A. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities.
-
Amanda Coate
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
BioAmanda Coate is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. She works on the cultural and intellectual histories of early modern Europe. She is particularly interested in the history of famine and hunger, animal-human interactions, the history of medicine and related fields of knowledge, and how people have conceptualized human nature and the extremes of human behavior, such as survival cannibalism. Her dissertation, "Experiences and Meanings of Hunger in Early Modern Europe, c. 1550-1700," examines early modern European cultural understandings of hunger and food scarcity. Using a wide range of sources (including diaries, sermons, news pamphlets, and medical literature), her dissertation tracks the multifaceted ways in which early modern Europeans experienced, portrayed, and comprehended their own and others’ hunger. Her work has been supported by Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences, the Europe Center at Stanford University, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University, and the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University.
Amanda's article, "An Elephant in Dublin: Animals and Knowledge in the Late Seventeenth Century," was recently published in the journal Early Science and Medicine. She has been a writer for the blog Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, and has written and recorded a podcast episode, "Cannibalism at the Siege of Sancerre," for the French History Podcast. Amanda is also enthusiastic about fostering appreciation for history and the humanities through teaching and is currently working on completing an Associate Level Teaching Certificate from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning. -
Anthony M. Comeau
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
BioAnthony Comeau is a first year PhD student in Stanford's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research interests broadly include political thought and its history and comparative literature. Anthony is particularly interested in the themes of love, education, and humanism in the comparative reception of canonical philosophers, theologians, and novelists in the modern Sinosphere, West, and Hispanosphere.
-
Jon Cooper
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioJon Cooper is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University. He is focused broadly on intellectual history in early modern Europe, with a special interest in the history of political economy in Britain and its empire. His dissertation project is provisionally entitled “Dealing with Money: A Genealogy of Economic Theology in England, 1544–1623".
-
Chris East
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2024
BioChris East is a PhD student in musicology at Stanford University. He studies Soviet music history, with a particular emphasis on official musical discourses of Socialist Realism. He is also interested in nightlife and dance music studies.
-
James Flynn
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2023
Other Tech - Graduate, ClassicsCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsJames Flynn is a PhD student in Ancient History. He focuses on the political, economic, and religious history of ancient Greece, and on connections with other contemporary societies, particularly ancient India. He is interested in the role of religion in legitimizing political institutions from a comparative perspective, and in the subordination of religion to political authority in the Greek poleis. For his undergraduate thesis at Brown, he compared trends among Hellenistic philosophers and Indian ascetics of withdrawal from society. For his Master’s capstone project at Yale, he wrote about the historical impact of climate change on 1st century BCE South Asia. He also pursued a second MA in religious studies, with a focus on Indian religions, and he studies the languages Sanskrit and Pali in addition to Latin and Greek. He is interested in using epigraphy and papyrology for historical sources. He is also interested in applying social scientific methods to large, cross-cultural datasets, looking for long-term trends in ancient history.
-
Rosaley Gai
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2020
EAH Workshop Coordinator, East Asian Languages and CulturesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on depictions of food and eating in modern Japanese literature and media. In particular, I am interested in how material studies, food discourse, and reader reception intertwine in fiction. Aside from my dissertation, I also work on material food studies, meat-eating in Japan, and lineages of transpacific "fusion" food in the 20th and 21st centuries. I am also a wagashi (Japanese sweets) maker and lead workshops at Stanford on occasion.
-
Vera Geranpayeh
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsVera Geranpayeh is a PhD candidate in German Studies. Her dissertation investigates how Vera Geranpayeh is a PhD Student in German Studies and PhD Minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. Her dissertation investigates how gender structures narrative movement in medieval German romance, focusing on minor female figures who remain structurally marginal yet narratively indispensable. She develops a framework for understanding how these figures catalyze plot progression through epistemic authority, mediation, and mobility, while remaining excluded from patriarchal mechanisms of narrative closure, such as minne and marriage.
In addition to her dissertation, she is developing a critical edition and English translation of a vernacular 1593 Franconian aristocratic household cookbook Ein koch büchlein vonn allerley speiß wie man sie kochen soll (1593). This project examines domestic authorship, women’s custodianship of culinary and medical knowledge, and the transmission of embodied expertise across generations.
Her research is further informed by training in Yiddish and a focused interest in early modern Yiddish texts, particularly domestic and practical writing, charms and magical materials, and the Yiddish Epic tradition.
She is also the student initiator of SCRIPTA, an interdisciplinary research group on gender, knowledge, and agency in premodern manuscript cultures, which combines theoretical discussion with hands-on archival work in Stanford’s Special Collections and hosts workshops with invited scholars.
She is the recipient of the Clayman Institute’s 2025 Marilyn Yalom Research Prize.
Her broader research spans queer survival, female bonds, and desire in nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle German literature. She is the recipient of the Clayman Institute’s 2025 Marilyn Yalom Research Prize. -
Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
BioChristopher Spencer Gurley, Jr is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where he specializes in American Religion and is pursuing a Ph.D. minor in history. His research explores the intersection of African American history and U.S. Catholic cultural life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is specifically interested in the religio-racial histories of U.S. Catholicism, Black identity constructions, Catholicism in the rural south, and the socio-historical politics of class and belonging regarding Black masculinity and manhood.
Before joining the Stanford community, he studied U.S. History at Georgetown University as a Patrick Healy Fellow. Chris earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tennessee State University and his Master of Theological Studies degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. He also holds a Master of Arts in Religion degree from Yale Divinity School, where he was chosen to become an Elie Wiesel-Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar at Oxford University. -
Mohammad H. Javaheri
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoexistence of Animate and Inanimate Within a Shared Sound Space
-
Zach Haines
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2022
Renaissance Music Project Assistant, MusicBioZachary Haines is a PhD student in Musicology at Stanford University. He is both an active scholar and performer as a baritone, with research interests in the vocal repertoires of the late Renaissance and early Baroque.
-
Julia Hirsch
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2021
Master of Arts Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025BioJulia Hirsch is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where she focuses on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a B.A. from Boston College in Philosophy with minors in Psychoanalytics and Women’s & Gender Studies (2015). She received her M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology: Religious Arts of Asia from SOAS University of London (2020).
Julia’s current research explores Buddhist material religion and visual culture, power objects, and ritual from an art-historical perspective. Of particular interest are relic cults, funerary rites, and the importance—and soteriological potential—of sensory encounter in South Asian and Himalayan traditions.
Prior to joining Stanford, Julia worked for several years at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, where she continues to serve as a contributing editor covering Buddhist art, film, and publishing. -
Christina Hiromi Hobbs
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and EthnicityBioChristina Hiromi Hobbs is an independent curator, writer, and art historian based in the Bay Area.
She is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity whose work focuses on twentieth century American art, modern and contemporary art of the Asian diaspora, and the history of photography. They are particularly interested in the intimacies of history, racial formation and historical memory, and vernacular archival practices.
Her recent projects include curating the exhibitions "In the Presence Of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association" at Berkeley Art Center (2024) and "Reflections of a Young Woman: Photographs from the Archive of Shigeko Kumamoto" at Latitude Chicago (2024). She also co-curated "No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration" at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York (2022) which was featured in Artforum, Momus, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, and Public Seminar.
They have held research and curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Modern Art Museum of Shanghai, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust. Her scholarship has been supported by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
