School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 111-120 of 129 Results
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Mikael Wolfe
Associate Professor of History
BioI am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see teaching tab to the right. I am accepting graduate students to work under me, but before contacting me, please become familiar with my work. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your own research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.)
My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. In so doing, it demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement the latter, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.
The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?
To answer this global question, my book integrates environmental and technological history along with social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable.
My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather shapes the process of social revolution across Cuba’s varied climates and environments. In my new book project, Rebellious Climates: How Extreme Weather Shaped the Cuban Revolutions, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians. -
Christine Min Wotipka
Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and, by courtesy, of Sociology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCross-national, comparative, and longitudinal analyses of leadership and higher education with a focus on gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.
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Xiaoze Xie
Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art
BioXiaoze Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has had solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Dallas Visual Art Center, TX; Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Gent, Belgium; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing; Gaain Gallery, Seoul; Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX; among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York and Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the traveling exhibition Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US. His 2004 solo at Charles Cowles was reviewed in “The New York Times”, “Art in America” and "Art Asia Pacific". More recent shows have been reviewed in “Chicago Tribune”, “The Globe and Mail” and “San Francisco Chronicle”. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Xie received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003) and artist awards from Phoenix Art Museum (1999) and Dallas Museum of Art (1996). Xie is the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University.
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Sylvia Yanagisako
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Emerita
BioSylvia Yanagisako is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Emerita. From 2023-2026 she will be Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research and publications have focused on the cultural dynamics of kinship, gender, work and capitalism. She has also written about the orthodox configuration of the discipline of anthropology in the U.S.
Professor Yanagisako’s latest book, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: a Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion (Duke University Press, 2019), co-authored with Lisa Rofel, analyzes the transnational business relations forged by Italian and Chinese textile and garment manufacturers . This book builds on her monograph (Producing Culture and Capital (Princeton University Press), which examines the cultural processes through which a technologically-advanced, Italian manufacturing industry was produced. Professor Yanagisako is currently conducting research on sea level rise, seashore management and family legacies in Hawai’i. -
Yinyu Ye
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research interests include Continuous and Discrete Optimization, Algorithm Development and Analyses, Algorithmic Game/Market Theory and Mechanism-Design, Markov Decision Process and Reinforcement Learning, Dynamic/Online Optimization and Resource Allocation, and Stochastic and Robust Decision Making. These areas have been the unique and core disciplines of MS&E, and extended to new application areas in AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, and Business Analytics.
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Lee Yearley
Walter Y. Evans-Wentz Professor of Oriental Philosophies, Religions and Ethics
BioLee Yearley works in comparative religious ethics and poetics, focusing on materials from China and the West. He is the author of The Ideas of Newman: Christianity and Human Religiosity and Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (recently translated into Chinese), as well as numerous journal articles and essays in edited volumes.
Professor Yearley holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.
