School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-79 of 79 Results
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William Tanner Allread
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIndigenous History, U.S. Legal History, History of U.S. Empire, Federal Indian Law, Tribal Law, Law of the Territories, Race and the Law, Constitutional Law, Property Law, Environmental Law
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Mathew Ayodele
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
SHI Discussion Leader, Stanford Pre-Collegiate 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.
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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
BioMarina Del Cassio is a history Ph.D. student focused on wildfire and water in California. She is particularly interested in learning from Native land stewardship practices, and in probing the nineteenth-century origins of California’s water rights, land use, and wildfire liability regimes. Her work aims to support pathways to sustainability and environmental justice. Before coming to Stanford, Marina practiced environmental law in San Francisco and clerked on the Ninth Circuit and the California Supreme Court. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
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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 PhD candidate in History at Stanford University, where she studies early modern Europe. Her research focuses primarily on the cultural and intellectual histories of 16th- and 17th-century Britain, Germany, and France. In her work, she has investigated ideas about cannibalism (particularly survival cannibalism), science and medicine in Britain and Ireland, and human-animal interactions. Her ongoing dissertation research examines early modern European understandings of hunger and food scarcity. During 2022-23, she was a writer for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.
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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 broadly focused 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: Financial Crisis and the Rise of Economics in England, 1560-1640".
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Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024BioChristopher 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. -
Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Graduate Mentor, Hume CenterCurrent 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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Kaitlynn Norton
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2023
Manuscript Asst, Special CollectionsBioKaitlynn Norton is an MA student in the field of Early Modern Europe. She earned her BA in History from UCLA, where she completed research on topics such as contemporary responses to witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and the social repercussions of the Black Death. Now her research focuses on court culture and etiquette in Medieval to Early Modern Britain.
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Greg Priest
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2011
BioI am a PhD candidate (ABD) in History of Science at Stanford. I focus on the history and philosophy of biology and the historical sciences, with particular interests in Charles Darwin and in the sciences of complex systems.
Before coming to Stanford, I was a lawyer, serving as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and then representing Silicon Valley technology companies. I left the law for the software business, first as CFO of a publicly-traded software company, next as founding CEO of a software start-up, and finally as Chairman and CEO of a global, publicly-traded internet education company.
I did my undergraduate work at Princeton and got my law degree at Stanford. I also have a Masters of Liberal Arts from Stanford. I am married, have two children and one grandchild and am an avid hiker, skier, and cook. -
Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
SU Student - Summer, History Department
SHI Discussion Leader, Stanford Pre-Collegiate StudiesBioSerena is a PhD candidate in History in the United States field. She is in her fourth year and she works on the history of ideas in the nineteenth century: particularly, how Americans thought about the ancient past as they entered modernity. Her dissertation explores late 19th-century interest in civilizational collapse and the Eastern Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age. 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
Current 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 Velez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University. Her research broadly examines the environmental impact of globalization on urban centers, with particular attention to environmental inequality. Her dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro-Atlanta’s rapid economic development in the second half of the twentieth century, when the city’s leaders embraced globalization both early and enthusiastically to great economic success, at the expense of the city’s built and natural environment.
Vannessa is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the Norall Award, and the Stanford Humanities Center Dissertation Prize. She is currently working on several projects, including a digital humanities project dedicated to research methods in Black Studies, an article on black environmental politics in the 1980s, and a co-authored article on race, globalization, and the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta.
