School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 of 72 Results
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Russell Berman
Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
BioProfessor Berman joined the Stanford faculty in 1979. He was awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin, and in 1997 the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has directed several National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College Teachers, and he is now a member of the National Humanities Council. At Stanford, he has served in several administrative offices, including Chair of German Studies, Director of the Overseas Studies Program, and Director of Stanford Introductory Studies. In 2011 he served as President of the Modern Language Association. Professor Berman is the editor emeritus of the quarterly journal Telos. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department. He is currently the Faculty Director of Comparative Literature at Stanford and Director of the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World at the Hoover Institution.
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Margaret Cohen
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProfessor Cohen has devoted her career to the literature and culture of modernity. Her books include Profane Illumination (1993) on the impact of surrealist Paris on Walter Benjamin; The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), on the role of women writers in shaping 19th-century French realism; and The Novel and the Sea (2010), about how writings about work at sea shaped the adventure novel. Her forthcoming book explores how underwater film and TV have shaped the cultural imagination.
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Adrian Daub
J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioMy research focuses on the long nineteenth century, in particular questions of gender in literature, music and philosophy. My first book, "Zwillingshafte Gebärden": Zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung des vierhändigen Klavierspiels im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), traces four-hand piano playing as both a cultural practice and a motif in literature, art and philosophy (an English edition of the book recently appeared as Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)). My second book Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explored German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche. Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013), deals with eroticism in German opera after Wagner. My most recent academic book, The Dynastic Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2020) traces the fate of the dynasty in the age of the nuclear family. A comparative and intermedial study of the ballad-form in nineteenth century Europe will appear in 2022 with Oxford University Press. In addition, I have published articles on topics such as fin-de-siècle German opera, women composers in the 19th century, the history of feminist philosophy, the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, film music, literature and scandal, the legacies of Richard Wagner, the cultural use of ballads in the nineteenth century, and writers like Novalis, Stefan George, Walter Benjamin, Sophie Mereau, Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald. I also write on popular culture and politics: in this capacity I co-wrote The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (with Charles Kronengold) and published a German-language essay collection Pop Up Nation (Hanser, 2016). My book What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) has been translated into five languages. I write articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Die Zeit (Germany), The Guardian (UK), The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads and the LA Review of Books. More information can be found on my personal website adriandaub.com.
I am the Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities. I have previously directed the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) and the Department of German Studies. -
Eagan Dean
Postdoctoral Scholar, Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAt the Clayman Institue, Eagan Dean is completing his book manuscript, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century American Literary Gender and its Uses. The monograph demonstrates that historical U.S. texts produced gender identities anew as rhetorical tools and used these tools to advance the political investments of their authors pertaining to racial and colonial power. Dean particularly focuses on emergent theories of the transgender figure’s role in the nation. The monograph investigates not simply what gender is, but what gender does in American history.
At Stanford, Dean will also devote time to developing their second project, Possessing a “Twofold Soul”: Toward A Spiritual Genealogy of The Trans Self in America, which investigates how early American religious ideas about the ineffable inner soul influenced gender identity’s emergence as a concept. This project critiques the conceptions of gender as an abstract personal property which echo colonial theories of interiority, which in turn were designed to exclude racialized Americans. In 2024, Dean won the Rising Scholar Prize from The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists for an essay drawn from this project. He is currently developing an article on antebellum gender nonconformity as a scholarly identity in collaboration with The Harvard Library Bulletin. -
Amir Eshel
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature
BioAmir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences. -
Marisa Galvez
Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioMarisa Galvez specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. At Stanford, she currently teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance French literature and love lyric, as well as interdisciplinary upper level courses on the medieval imaginary in modern literature, film, and art.
Her first book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2012, awarded John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America), treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category, “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. The first comparative study of songbooks, the book concerns three vernacular traditions—Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian—and analyzes how the songbook emerged from its original performance context of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and finally became a literary object that performs the interests of poets and readers.
Her second book, The Subject of Crusade:Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines how the crusader subject of vernacular literature sought to reconcile secular ideals about love and chivalry with crusade. This study places this literature in dialogue with new ideas about penance and confession that emerged from the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth. Subject argues that poetic articulations are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon, and examines another version of speaking crusades, in which lyric, romance and materials such as tapestries, textiles, and tombstones manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals. -
Roland Greene
Director, Stanford Humanities Center, Mark Pigott KBE Professor, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioRoland Greene's research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present.
His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, 1999), which follows the love poetry of the Renaissance into fresh political and colonial contexts in the New World; and Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), a transhistorical and comparative study of lyric poetics through the fortunes of the lyric sequence from Petrarch to Neruda. Greene is the editor with Elizabeth Fowler of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997). His essays address topics such as the colonial baroque, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti, Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry, and Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Greene is editor in chief of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which was published in 2012. Prepared in collaboration with the general editor Stephen Cushman and the associate editors Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer, this edition represents a complete revision of the most authoritative reference book on poetry and poetics.
In 2015-16 he served as President of the Modern Language Association.
At Stanford Greene has been co-chair and founder of two research workshops in which most of his Ph.D. students participate. Renaissances brings together early modernists from the Bay Area to discuss work in progress, while the Poetics Workshop provides a venue for innovative scholarship in the broad field of international and historical poetics.
Greene has taught at Harvard and Oregon, where for six years he was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Danforth Foundation, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. -
Mark Greif
Associate Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioMark Greif’s scholarly work looks at the connections of literature to intellectual and cultural history, the popular arts, aesthetics and everyday ethics. He taught at the New School and Brown before coming to Stanford.
He is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton, 2015), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Prize for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. His book Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism. His current book concerns the history and aesthetics of pornography from the eighteenth century to the internet age.
In 2003, Greif was a founder of the journal n+1, and has been a principal member of the organization since. His books as co-editor and co-author have included The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street (n+1/FSG, 2012), Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011), and What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1/HarperCollins, 2010). His books and articles have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
He has been a Marshall Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
Greif has written for publications including the London Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde, and his essays have been selected for Best American Essays and the Norton Anthology. He remains interested in the relationships between high scholarship, literary and arts journalism, low culture, and small magazines.