School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 309 Results
-
Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
BioChristopher 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. -
Mohammad H. Javaheri
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoexistence of Animate and Inanimate Within a Shared Sound Space
-
Zach Haines
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2022
Renaissance Music Project Assistant, MusicBioZachary Haines is a PhD student in Musicology at Stanford University. He is both an active scholar and performer as a baritone, with research interests in the vocal repertoires of the late Renaissance and early Baroque.
-
Julia Hirsch
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2021
Master of Arts Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025BioJulia Hirsch is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where she focuses on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a B.A. from Boston College in Philosophy with minors in Psychoanalytics and Women’s & Gender Studies (2015). She received her M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology: Religious Arts of Asia from SOAS University of London (2020).
Julia’s current research explores Buddhist material religion and visual culture, power objects, and ritual from an art-historical perspective. Of particular interest are relic cults, funerary rites, and the importance—and soteriological potential—of sensory encounter in South Asian and Himalayan traditions.
Prior to joining Stanford, Julia worked for several years at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, where she continues to serve as a contributing editor covering Buddhist art, film, and publishing. -
Christina Hiromi Hobbs
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and EthnicityBioChristina Hiromi Hobbs is an independent curator, writer, and art historian based in the Bay Area.
She is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity whose work focuses on twentieth century American art, modern and contemporary art of the Asian diaspora, and the history of photography. They are particularly interested in the intimacies of history, racial formation and historical memory, and vernacular archival practices.
Her recent projects include curating the exhibitions "In the Presence Of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association" at Berkeley Art Center (2024) and "Reflections of a Young Woman: Photographs from the Archive of Shigeko Kumamoto" at Latitude Chicago (2024). She also co-curated "No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration" at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York (2022) which was featured in Artforum, Momus, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, and Public Seminar.
They have held research and curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Modern Art Museum of Shanghai, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust. Her scholarship has been supported by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. -
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.
-
Emerson Johnston
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Winter 2025
Research Assistant for the Hoover Technology Policy Accelerator, HOOVER RESEARCHBioEmerson Johnston is a Research Assistant at the Hoover Institution’s Technology Policy Accelerator, where she works on the Stanford Emerging Technology Review and research related to emerging technologies and their impact on national security. She is currently on leave from Stanford’s MA program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine, where her thesis examines how institutional and historical legacies have shaped the framing of the internet as a telecommunications system rather than a civic or social space. More broadly, her research focuses on the sociocultural implications of digital platforms, algorithmic governance, and the intersection of technology and international policy. A first-generation, lower-income college student and a native of Los Angeles, California, she received an B.S. in ‘Politics, Philosophy, and Economics’ and in ‘History, Culture, and Law’, summa cum laude, from Northeastern University and an MA in International Policy from Stanford, where she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.
You can find more about her and her work on her website: https://www.emersonjohnston.org -
Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
CCRMA Student Assistant, MusicBioKimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is an Iranian composer and performer. She writes for hybrid instrumental/electronic ensembles, creates electroacoustic and audiovisual works, builds instruments, and performs electronic music. She explores the unfamiliar familiar while being motivated by how melodies unfold through time; finding ways to play with various musical thresholds and exploring musical extremes is something that she is currently attracted to. Her work experiments with merging Iranian music with the more contemporary classical music aesthetics.
Being a cross-disciplinary artist, she has actively collaborated on projects evolving around dance, film, and theater. She is the co-founder and producer of Fashion x Electronics, a collective focused on creating interdisciplinary works based on fashion and electronic music.
Kimia’s work has been showcased by organizations across the globe and her work has been performed internationally at festivals including Ars Electronica, Festival Ecos Urbanos, Tehran Contemporary Sounds, Sonic Matter Festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Sound and Music Conference, and Modulus Festival, among others.
She holds a BFA in Music Composition from Simon Fraser University’s Interdisciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts. Kimia is currently based in San Francisco and is a doctorate candidate in Music Composition at Stanford University. -
Joaquín Lara Midkiff
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2025
BioJoaquín Lara Midkiff is a doctoral student studying as a Dean's Fellow in the Department of History focused on Indígena communities from Mexico and Central America in social and labor movements in the United States during the twentieth century. His earlier scholarship has centered on social histories of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Joaquín comes from a family of working-class folks from Oklahoma and northern California and Nahua migrant farmworkers from Guerrero’s cohuixca. He served Oregon communities on public and non-profit boards, including Cherriots (Salem Area Mass Transit), the Oregon Disabilities Commission, and PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union.
He has also contributed essays on houselessness, disability justice, and immigration that have appeared in the Oregonian, Truthout, and Yale Review of International Studies, among others, and poetry in The Future Lives in our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022). -
Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
Reading Group Coordinator, History DepartmentBioYoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in Early Modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining them, particularly in northern German protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science, the history of education, and the history of the book.
-
Jingpu Li
Ph.D. Student in Chinese, admitted Autumn 2022
Current Research and Scholarly Interests1. The eastward spread of grape wine and its sinicization-archaeological evidence from northwest China in the Tang dynasty
2. Speculation on the death of Haihun Marquis in the Han Dynasty—Evidence from spectroscopic analysis of buried soils
3. Analysis of organic residues in small pottery from the Cha'Hai Site in the Early Neolithic of Northern China
4. Study on pit mud of Suixi Brewing Site in Ming & Qing Dynasties -
Bingxiao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Chinese, admitted Autumn 2020
BioBingxiao Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. Her research interests include premodern Chinese literature, cultural and intellectual history; gender and sexuality; emotions, literary and political culture. Her research examines how emotions are invoked or invented to constitute interpersonal ties in 3rd - 6th century China. Working with official histories, commentaries, inscriptions, and literary works, her project explores the reconceptualization of identity and community in emotive terms and the signification of emotion as the legitimizing basis for a new social order in medieval China.
-
Mengyao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Computer ScienceBioI am broadly interested in the production of knowledge in ancient worlds, with a particular interest in the Greco-Roman and Chinese traditions. My curiosity is a comparative and genealogical one at root: by comparing different societies, I seek to grasp the historicity of intellectual practices and the ideas thus produced. Currently, my research interest focuses on astronomy and astrology in Ancient Greece and China.
While completing my B.A. in Classics at Sorbonne University, I investigated how the urban metamorphoses of Rome materialized the transformation of the political regime. My master's thesis at EHESS, "Statues pour les corps, livres pour les mots" : La vie (βἰος) et la rhétorique (λόγος) dans les Discours Sacrés, offers insight into the psychosomatic relations conceived by the Greeks. The inquiry breaks into two interdependent questions: the therapeutic usage of rhetorical practices and the unconventional representation of Asclepius in the Sacred Tales of Aristides.
Having one year of training in software engineering from Tsinghua University, I am also passionate about the potentials of digital humanities. -
Courtney MacPhee
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Peer Teaching Mentor, History Department
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentCurrent 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 -
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. -
Tatiana Monserrat Miranda-Benavides
Ph.D. Student in Iberian & Latin American Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
BioTatiana Monserrat Miranda-Benavides studies literature and philosophy, with a focus on modern Latin American literature and early modern Iberian texts. She approaches these fields through existentialist frameworks to examine questions of subjectivity and temporality.
