School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 241-260 of 262 Results
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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. -
Darion Aaron Wallace
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2020
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Spring 2023
Other Tech - Graduate, African and African American Studies
Student Employee, Other Advising ProgramsBioDarion A. Wallace, from Inglewood, CA, is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Education in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education, History of Education, and Sociology of Education programs. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Rhetoric and African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in International Education Policy Analysis from Stanford University. As a Black Education Studies scholar, Darion’s research draws upon Black Studies, Sociology, and History, while employing mixed methods, to interrogate the ways K-12 American schools cohere logics of (anti)blackness and structure the life and educational outcomes of Black students across temporal and spatial bounds. Moreover, he is interested in how abolitionist praxes, pedagogies, and epistemologies rooted in the Black radical and intellectual tradition have and continue to serve a liberatory function in the project of Black education. To this aim, Darion is interested in partnering with public schools and libraries to develop secondary students’ historical literacies and archival skills to help them better understand the localized sociopolitical context that undergirds their lived experience. Previously, he has worked with the Learning Policy Institute as a Research and Policy Associate, the Service Employees International Union as an Organizer, and San Francisco State University as an Africana Studies Lecturer on Black Masculinities and Black Social Science.
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Amir Weiner
Associate Professor of History
BioAmir Weiner’s research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. His first book, Making Sense of War analyzed the role and impact of the cataclysm of the Second World War on Soviet society and politics. His current project, Wild West, Window to the West engages the territories between the Baltic and Black Seas that were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-40, from the initial occupation to present. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; the Origins of Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.
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Karen Wigen
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioKären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography at Stanford. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano.
An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis, and to co-direct the "Oceans Connect" project at Duke University. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas ( University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016). -
Caroline Winterer
William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics and of Education
BioCaroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science. She is currently writing a book on the history of deep time in America, to be published by Princeton University Press.
She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, the history of science, and the trans-Atlantic contexts of American thought.
She is the author of five books, including most recently Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era (Chicago, 2020), edited with her Stanford colleague Karen Wigen. Assembling a group of distinguished historians, cartographers, and art historians, the book shows how maps around the world for the last 500 years have ingeniously handled time in the spatial medium of maps.
Her book American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016), showed how early Americans grappled with the promises of the Enlightenment – how they used new questions about the plants, animals, rocks, politics, religions and peoples of the New World to imagine a new relationship between the present and the past, and to spur far-flung conversations about a better future for all of humanity. Earlier books and articles have explored America's long tradition of looking at the ancient classical world for political, artistic, and cultural inspiration. She received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution for mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/dear-sir-ben-franklin-would-like-to-add-you-to-his-network-180947639/.
She is currently accepting graduate students. For more information on the PhD program in the Department of History, visit: https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs. -
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. -
Ali Yaycioglu
Associate Professor of History
BioAli Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research centers on economic, political and legal institutions and practices as well as social and cultural life in southeastern Europe and the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. He also has a research agenda on how people imagined, represented and recorded property, territory, and nature in early periods. Furthermore, Yaycioglu explores how we can use digital tools to understand, visualize and conceptualize these imaginations, representations and recordings. Yaycioglu’s first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Currently Dr. Yaycioglu is working on a book project entitled The Ultimate Debt: State, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire, in which he analyzes transformations in property, finance and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ali Yaycioglu is the supervisor of a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
