School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-78 of 78 Results
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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). -
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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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. -
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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Emerson Johnston
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Winter 2025
Research Assistant for the Hoover Technology Policy Accelerator, HOOVER RESEARCHBioEmerson Johnston is a Research Assistant at the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator, where she works on the Stanford Emerging Technology Review and research related to emerging technologies and their impact on national security. She is currently on leave from Stanford’s MA program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine, where her thesis examines how institutional and historical legacies have shaped the framing of the internet as a telecommunications system rather than a civic or social space. More broadly, her research focuses on the sociocultural implications of digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and the intersection of technology and international policy. A first-generation, lower-income college student and a native of Los Angeles, California, she received an B.S. in ‘Politics, Philosophy, and Economics’ and in ‘History, Culture, and Law’, summa cum laude, from Northeastern University and an MA in International Policy from Stanford, where she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.
You can find more about her and her work on her website: https://www.emersonjohnston.org -
Joaquín Lara Midkiff
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2025
BioJoaquín Lara Midkiff is a doctoral student studying as a Dean's Fellow in the Department of History focused on Indígena communities from Mexico and Central America in social and labor movements in the United States during the twentieth century. His earlier scholarship has centered on social histories of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Joaquín comes from a family of working-class folks from Oklahoma and northern California and Nahua migrant farmworkers from Guerrero’s cohuixca. He served Oregon communities on public and non-profit boards, including Cherriots (Salem Area Mass Transit), the Oregon Disabilities Commission, and PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union.
He has also contributed essays on houselessness, disability justice, and immigration that have appeared in the Oregonian, Truthout, and Yale Review of International Studies, among others, and poetry in The Future Lives in our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022). -
Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
BioYoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in Early Modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining them, particularly in northern German protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science, the history of education, and the history of the book.
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Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Peer Teaching Mentor, History Department
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentCurrent Role at StanfordCo-coordinator of the Religion, Politics, and Culture Workshop, sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center
Communications Coordinator of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University
Graduate Mentor for Undergraduate Honors Thesis Writers -
Andrew Patrick Nelson
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2018
Ph.D. Minor, History
Ph.D. Minor, LinguisticsBioI am a PhD Candidate in the Japanese Linguistics track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. My research is motivated by two primary areas of inquiry: first, to what extent can methods in linguistic science be applied to historical documents to recover a speaker/writer intent and reader/listener interpretation? Second, in what ways are language changes perceived, categorized, and valorized; in what ways do those perceptions, categories, and values shape language ideology; and in what ways does language ideology in turn change language use? My work brings together methods in psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics in analyzing texts on language written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Japanese texts as a primary case study, but also leveraging sources in English, French, and German for a transnational perspective.
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Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
Research Assistant, History DepartmentBioSerena is a PhD candidate in History in the United States field. She is in her fifth year and she works on the history of ideas in the nineteenth century, especially Americans' ideas about antiquity. Her dissertation investigates the history of oriental scholarship in the United States. It examines Americans' post-Civil War investment in pre-classical antiquity, and the 3,000-4,000 year-old history of the Bronze Age Orient (the site of the most ancient "Eastern" civilizations, or the modern Middle East). She is also currently writing a research article on Greek and Roman slave-naming practices and the classicism of American slavery.
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Adele Leigh Stock
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsHistory of environment, religion, and technology in 20c urban Africa
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Merve Tekgürler
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Masters Student in Symbolic Systems, admitted Autumn 2023BioMerve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.
Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.
As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Merve’s research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI in Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World, which they started with Adrien Zakar in Winter 2020. They also contributed to their advisor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Mapping Ottoman Epirus project, building a placenames dataset from an Ottoman transportation map and developing a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with exaggerated elevation data.
Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop (AY 2021-22 & 2022-23). They also worked as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA from Spring 2021 to Fall 2022. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects. -
Vannessa Velez
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2017
BioVannessa is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history with an interest in racial capitalism, science and technology studies, and urban environmental inequality. Her dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro Atlanta’s rapid economic development from the beginning of national urban renewal in 1949 to 1996 when the city cemented its status as a global hub after hosting the Centennial Olympics. In particular, she focuses on how Atlanta’s early and enthusiastic embrace of globalization and new urban planning and engineering trends led to great economic success and widespread celebration as the new "Black Mecca" for African American business and culture. Unfortunately, this progress came at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable communities and their local environments—the consequences of which Atlanta is struggling to overcome today.
Her research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Stanford Humanities Center, the Eisenhower Institute, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the MIT SHASS Fellowship program, and the University of Pennsylvania's Provost Predoctoral Fellowship program.
