School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-100 of 310 Results
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Oluwakemisola Adeusi
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Political Science
Writing Tutor, School of Engineering - Technical Communications ProgramBioKemi’s research interests include transnational, Afro-German, and migrant literature. Her work explores the representations of the inter- and intra-migrant relations in contemporary German migrant literature.
Before joining Stanford's German Department as a Ph.D. student in 2022, she earned a B.A. degree in German from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in 2019, and completed her M.A. program in German from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in 2022. She is a 2024/25 student fellow at the Hoover Institution, exploring topics about the migration issue in Germany and the AfD political party. She is also a fellow and mentor of the EDGE fellowship (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education). -
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 Studies
Grad Writing Tutor, Hume CenterBioMarlon 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.
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Mathew Ayodele
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
CAS - Graduate Student Assistant, Center for African Studies
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentBioMathew 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.
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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
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentBioMarina 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.
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Luther Cox Cenci
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy dissertation examines the unexpected itineraries, mutations, and afterlives of late imperial Chinese legal culture across the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia during the long 19th century. Empirically, my study uses archives in classical and vernacular Chinese, Dutch, and English and situated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, London, and the Hague. Viewed together, they reveal how the communal identities and institutions of Chinese migrants and their descendants were shaped by world-historical forces: the rise of global capitalism and European colonialism, the contest between liberal and pluralist models of law and sovereignty, and the transformation and eventual collapse of the late Qing state.
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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.
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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, with a geographical focus on the British Isles, France, and Germany. She is particularly interested in 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 is also enthusiastic about fostering appreciation for history and the humanities through teaching. She is currently working on completing an Associate Level Teaching Certificate from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning. During 2022-23, she was a writer for the blog Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. -
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.
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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".
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Chris East
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2024
BioChris East is a PhD student in musicology at Stanford University. He studies early twentieth-century Russian ballet music, with a particular focus on the music of Igor Stravinsky.
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Kennii Ekundayo
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2024
BioKehinde “Kennii” Ekundayo is an independent curator specializing in global contemporary art. Since 2017, she has curated exhibitions in her home country, Nigeria, and internationally, working with artists, institutions, and collections alike to realize highly publicized projects. Of particular note is "Idi Owena," a 63-year-spanning retrospective exhibition on Bruce Onobrakpeya’s artistry at the San Diego State University Gallery in Spring '22.
Ekundayo's current research is focused on the responses of under-represented and/or understudied artists to issues of conflict, forced migration, and environmentalism--three subjects which have proven critical to shaping the course of the millennium. Her research is particularly directed at (the activities of) refugee artists who have resettled in the United States since 1990 to date, delineating their contributions to contemporary art theory. She is also interested in the evolution of artistic processes over time, exploring artistic interpretations of human connections, and examining relationships between art and place.
Her MA thesis titled, “Retelling the Story of Place: Aestheticizing the Double Jeopardy of Flooding in Brazil and Nigeria” is a comparative analysis of artistic interventions to the flood disasters in Brazil and Nigeria. Her writings have appeared across exhibition catalogs and academic publication. -
James Flynn
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2023
Master of Arts Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
Greek Language Tutor, 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 is concurrently pursing 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.
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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, phenomenology, 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 Japanese wagashi maker and lead workshops at Stanford on occasion.
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Enam Gbewonyo
Master of Fine Arts Student, Art Practice
BioEnam Gbewonyo is a British-Ghanian textile and performance artist, curator, and founder of the BBFA (Black British Female Artist) Collective - now defunct. Her art practice investigates identity – Black womanhood in particular, whilst advocating the healing benefits of craft. She uses performance as a vessel, creating live spaces of healing that direct audiences to a positive place of awareness, countering systems of oppression such as racism and sexism. Her work enables audiences to face the truth of the dark past surrounding colonial legacies and the emotions it brings forth.
Recent exhibitions include Memoria: récits d’une Histoire at Fondation H, Madagascar, Neo-Custodians: Woven Narratives of Heritage, Cultural Memory and Belonging at Bemis Center in Omaha, USA, DELLU her first institutional solo show at New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK, Body Poetics at Southampton’s GIANT Gallery, and Rites of Passage at Gagosian London. Her work has been exhibited and showcased internationally at the 58th Venice Biennale, Art X Lagos, and UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami. Her performance films have been selected for notable film festivals including; Portland Dance Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival and AVIFF Cannes Art Film Festival.
Gbewonyo’s works are in private and public collections including Fondation H, Madagascar and White & Case LLP, UK. She is a 2022 recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award and winner of the 2022 Dentons Art Prize and New Art Exchange Future Exhibition Prize respectively. She is also a fellow of Black Rock Senegal, Bemis Center, (Omaha, USA) and Fondation H, Madagascar artist residencies. -
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 gender drives narrative in medieval German literature, engaging (feminist) narratology, structuralist approaches, and theories of minor characters. She examines how minor female figures catalyze narrative movement by disrupting the course of patriarchal progression, and how these structural dynamics reverberate across periods into modern literature. Her work develops a narratological framework that highlights their epistemic authority, grounded in Otherness, marked by exclusion from minne.
In addition, she pursues a project on the 1593 Hohenlohe cookbook, focusing on domestic authorship, female custodianship of knowledge, and the cultural transmission of culinary practices in early modern German aristocratic households.
She is co-initiator of SCRIPTA, an interdisciplinary research group on gender, knowledge, and agency in premodern manuscript cultures that combines theoretical discussion with hands-on archival work in Stanford’s Special Collections and hosts workshops with guest scholars from other institutions.
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.
