School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-50 of 71 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
On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025BioMark 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. -
Ariel Horowitz
Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature, admitted Autumn 2021
BioAriel Horowitz is a graduate student in Comparative Literature, focusing on Jewish literature and the ways in which twentieth-century Jewish writers, both Israeli and American, understand History. He holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the Hebrew University, and an M.A. (Summa Cum Laude) from the Hebrew University, where he wrote his thesis about Gershom Scholem's influence on Yaakov Shabtai's magnum opus, Past Continuous. Other interests include political theology, literary theory and continental philosophy. Ariel is also a novelist: his debut novel, Our Finest, was published with Keter Publishing House in 2021.
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Hector Hoyos
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioHéctor Hoyos is a scholar of modern Latin American and comparative literature. He writes about ideological critiques of globalization in the post-1989 Latin American novel, the articulation of critical theory and new materialism in the region’s cultural production, and related topics. His current monograph in progress examines the works of Gabriel García Márquez from a law and humanities perspective.
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Christopher Krebs
Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioChristopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He was a lecturer at University College (Oxford) and an assistant (2004-09) and then associate professor (2009-12) at the department of the Classics at Harvard, before he joined the Classics department at Stanford. In the spring of 2007 he was the professeur invité at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), in 2008/9 the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (on which see his “You say putator” in the TLS), and, most recently, the recipient of the Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
His publications include Negotiatio Germaniae. Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and A most dangerous book. Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), which has or will be translated into six languages. He has also co-edited a volume on Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 as well as an intellectual history of the late Roman Republic (with W.W. Norton); he is also co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Caesar. Other long-term projects and interests focus on Posidonius, Sallust and Tacitus, Latin lexicography, Thersites and Prometheus, and Annio di Viterbo.
He organized and co-chaired a seminar on Classical Traditions at Harvard Humanities Center, where he also co-hosted a conference on “The Reception of Odysseus in Literature, Art, and Music” (April 2009). He co-organized a conference on “The historians’ Plupast” (2006), an APA Panel on “Caesar the ‘Litterator’” (January 2012), and a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist,” at Amherst College (September 2012). He will deliver the third annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies (at Emory University) in the fall of 2013 and the forty-third Skotheim Lecture in History (at Whitman College) in the spring of 2014. In the summer of 2014 he will co-teach in France a seminar on Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute.
Most recent and forthcoming articles include: “Annum quiete et otio transiit: Tacitus (Agr. 6.3) and Sallust on liberty, tyranny, and human dignity” (A Companion to Tacitus), “M. Manlius Capitolinus: the metaphorical plupast and metahistorical reflections” (The historians’ Plupast), “Caesar, Lucretius and the dates of De Rerum Natura and the Commentarii” (Classical Quarterly), and “Caesar’s Sisenna” (Classical Quarterly).
In 2012-13 he will offer the following courses: Advanced Latin: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline; Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians (cross-listed in Anthropology); a freshman seminar Eloquence Personified: How to Speak Like Cicero; and a graduate seminar on Sallust and Virgil. In 2013-14 he will offer graduate seminars on The fragmentary Roman Historians and Lucan and the poetics of civil war, advanced Greek: Attic Orators and advanced Latin: Tacitus. He also teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies: a course on Tacitus (Tacitus: Character Assassin, Satirist, and Trenchant Historian) in the winter term, and a course on Lucan (The Dark Genius: Lucan, his civil war epos, and the court of Nero) in the spring. -
Glenn Anthony Kurtz
Lecturer
BioGlenn Kurtz is the author of "Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. The Los Angeles Times called the book “breathtaking,” and it has received high critical praise in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and many other publications.
A documentary film based on the book, "Three Minutes: A Lengthening," directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021. It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2022 and has screened at festivals worldwide. In May 2022, it was awarded the inaugural Yad Vashem Award for Excellence in Holocaust Documentary Filmmaking.
Glenn’s first book, "Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), also received enthusiastic reviews from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
A frequent public speaker, Glenn has presented keynote addresses at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington D.C.); the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies (University of Texas at Dallas); the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, Chapman University (Orange, CA); the Jewish Historical Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); The Wiener Library (London, U.K.); the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw, Poland), and at many other venues in the U.S. and internationally.
For four years, he hosted “Conversations on Practice,” a discussion series about the writing process and the writer’s life. Guests included Patti Smith, Martin Amis, Jennifer Egan, Adam Gopnik, Francine Prose, Tom McCarthy, Dani Shapiro, and Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, among many others.
Glenn is a 2019-2023 Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, Orange, CA, and the recipient of a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. A graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music, he holds a PhD from Stanford University in German studies and comparative literature. He has taught at San Francisco State University, New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and Stanford University. -
Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
On Leave from 09/01/2024 To 08/31/2025BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.
Professor Landy has appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "Philosophy Talk" (on narrative selfhood and on the function of fiction) and has on various occasions been a guest host of Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty).
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. -
Haiyan Lee
Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsModern Chinese literature and popular culture; philosophy and literature; law and literature; cognitive literary studies; affect studies; cultural studies of gender, sexuality, race, and religion; the nonhuman and environmental humanities
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Indra Levy
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy of Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025BioIndra Levy received her Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2001. She is the author of Sirens of the Western Shore: the Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia, 2006) and editor of Translation in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2009). She has served as Executive Director for the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) since 2010. In 2022, she was named the inaugural recipient of the Irene Hirano Inouye Award from the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for her contributions to Japanese Studies. Her current work focuses on humor in Japanese literature, performance, and translation from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. Her research interests include modern Japanese literature and criticism; critical translation studies; gender and language; modern Japanese performance, especially in the Meiji and Taishō eras; and modern Japanese women’s intellectual history.
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Fernando Martinez Periset
Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature, admitted Autumn 2022
BioHello, this is Fernando. Thanks for stopping by! Before joining Stanford's department of Comparative Literature as a doctoral student in 2022, I trained as a comparatist at Durham, the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. My main supervisor here at Stanford is Roland Greene.
In terms of research interests, the main issue I keep coming back to (which partly derives from my experiences studying in different countries) is how and why intercultural encounters function as driving forces of creative production in its different forms. With a focus on big-picture thinking and global perspectives in the study of cultural history, I see such creative practices at work in the overlaps among literature, art history and philosophy, particularly continental philosophy. More precisely, I believe I am drawn to two broad questions: how classical theories of ethics and subjectivity (like Stoicism and Epicureanism) produced changes in societal values within Early Modern culture, and how the Renaissance, in turn, shaped attitudes to selfhood in later movements, especially Romanticism. From the standpoint of transhistorical reception studies, I would like to explore the inner lives of people from the past as a way of finding questions that speak to our own present. That is why specific topics of interest include the intersections of literary forms with the history of emotions, the history of ethics, cognitive anthropology, psychology, migrations, intellectual history and religion. I like poetry (both studying it and writing it), the epic tradition as well as theatre. Beyond French, Latin, Spanish and English, I am expanding into Portuguese and Arabic.
I am currently developing a research project on Milton and the classical tradition.
Some of my favourite authors include figures from Classical Antiquity and Early Modernity, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Racine, Seneca, Lucretius, Virgil, Homer, Quevedo, but also more recent figures whose work intervenes in and develops preexisting structures of ethics and emotions. I look forward to discovering new, exciting figures.
I would be delighted to hear from students and researchers (from Stanford and beyond!) with whom I could share intellectual interests, so please feel free to drop me a line. -
Jisha Menon
Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioJisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies. She serves as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical theory and performance studies; law and performance; race and the carceral state; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; gender and sexuality; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her current research project, Confessional Performance: The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood, explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. The book argues that attending to the fictive constitution of the person within the law allows us to highlight the artifice, indeed, the aesthetics that are central to jurisprudence. Her four books explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her newest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, the book delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence and performance, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Rights, Social Justice, Ethics, Race and Ethnicity
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Grant Parker
Associate Professor of Classics, of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioGrant Parker joined Stanford from Duke University in 2006. He teaches Latin and other topics in Roman imperial culture; he has worked on the history of collecting and on historical maps. His books include The Making of Roman India (2008) and The Agony of Asar: a former slave's defence of slavery, 1742 (2001). He has edited a major volume, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (forthcoming 2016/7). Current research projects focus on memorialization and public history, in both Rome and South Africa (including comparison).
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Patricia Parker
Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature
BioPatricia Parker received her M.A. in English at the University of Toronto and taught for three years in Tanzania, whose President Julius Nyerere also translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili. After teaching at the University of East Africa, she completed her Ph.D. at Yale, in Comparative Literature, and taught for 11 years at the University of Toronto. First invited to Stanford as a Visiting Professor in 1986, she came to Stanford permanently in 1988 as a Professor in both English and Comparative Literature. She has also taught as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of the core faculty at the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University, 1998). She is the author of four books (Inescapable Romance, a study of romance from Ariosto to Wallace Stevens; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; Shakespeare from the Margins; and Shakespearean Intersections) and co-editor of five collections of essays on criticism, theory, and cultural studies, including Shakespeare and the Question of Theory and Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. She has lectured widely in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and other parts of the world, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other universities; as Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, Shakespeare's Birthday lecturer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Northrop Frye Professor lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Paul Gottschalk lecturer at Cornell University; and has served on the Advisory Board of the English Institute. In 2003-4, she organized an international conference and public festival at Stanford devoted to “Shakespeare in Asia.” She has also worked with students to create performance-based programs in the community. She currently teaches courses on Shakespeare (including Global Shakespeares), the Bible and Literature, Epic and Empire and other topics. In addition to books-in-progress on Shakespeare, rhetoric, race, and gender, she is the General Editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, which will be released online as a global reference work free to anyone in the world with access to the internet.
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Ato Quayson
Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn addition to an interest in comparative cultural traditions of tragedy, I also have a strong interest in comparative urban studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and interdisciplinarity, among others.
