School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 437 Results
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Gabriel Ellis
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2017
BioGabriel Ellis is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford University. He writes on aesthetics and affect in popular music and culture.
In his dissertation, Gabriel explores the thematization of numbness, sleep, and narcotic intoxication in musical genres ranging from 1980s shoegaze and dreampop to contemporary trap music and cloud rap. He argues that artists in these genres have developed uniquely refined aesthetic vocabularies for evoking states of “not-feeling,” paradoxically translating experiences of sensory deprivation into the sensual medium of sound. In response, he develops a theory of “anaesthetics”— the aesthetics of anaesthesia—which he offers as a paradigm for analyzing not just popular song and music video but also contemporary film, literature, digital media, and everyday life.
Gabriel’s other areas of interest include critical theory, media studies, post-Marxist aesthetics, and the study of “feelings” of all sorts, including moods, tones, textures, affects, emotions, and vibes. -
Amanda Gaggioli
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2016
BioAmanda is a Ph.D candidate on the Classical Archaeology track. She received a B.A. with honors in both Archaeology and Classics with a minor in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University. She also completed an MA in Anthropology at Stanford. Amanda’s research includes interdisciplinary approaches that combine ancient textual, archaeological, and natural scientific approaches to past human-geological environmental relationships, in particular earthquakes and associated seismic phenomena, in the eastern Mediterranean. Her research interests include human-enviornment relationships, resilience archaeology, archaeological science, geoarchaeology, soil micromorphology, archaeoseismology, resilience archaeology, traditional environmental knowledge, and the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age transition in the eastern Mediterranean. Her PhD research includes archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece, spanning the third millennium BCE to fifth century CE, that aims at understanding how people were impacted by and responded to earthquakes and associated seismic hazards over both the short- and long-terms. She analyzes ancient textual sources that document earthquakes together with the material and geological residues of earthquakes from the archaeological record. She applies the techniques and approaches of archaeoseismology and soil micromorphology on targeted samples of architectural and geomorphological remains in order to determine relationships between humans, geological environmental change, and disaster both in the context of ‘collapse’ during the Late Bronze Age and also across temporal and spatial scales.
Amanda currently holds a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, National Geographic Early Career Grant, and a Multi-Country Fellowship with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers in support of her interdisciplinary dissertation research and fieldwork in Greece and Cyprus and her memberships with the American School of Classical Studies and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute.
https://stanford.academia.edu/AmandaGaggioli -
Melisande Genat
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2014
BioMélisande Genat is a doctoral student in History at Stanford University. Her dissertation is entitled "Tribes, State, and Ethno-religious Identities in Iraq (1918-2021). She has been living and conducting research in Iraq since 2010.
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Danielle Marie Greene
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2017
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2017
Ph.D. Minor, LinguisticsBioDanielle Greene is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) and Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education (CTE) programs at the Graduate School of Education. From Virginia, Danielle previously taught middle school Social Studies in an urban district before coming to Stanford. Focusing on the social context of education, her research explores teaching cultures and language practices within K-12 public schools that have majority African American students, faculty, and staffs. Specifically, Danielle centers African American resistances to linguistic, cultural, and physical Black displacement and dispossession in schools and their surrounding communities. Finally, she also has the immense pleasure of serving as the Chief of Staff of the Richmond Resilience Initiative - a guaranteed income pilot serving working-class residents of Richmond, Virginia.
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Yahui He
Ph.D. Student in Chinese, admitted Autumn 2017
BioYahui He is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, specializing in Chinese archaeology. Her research interests include human-plant relationship, food production and consumption, and their discourses in environmental and social dimensions of prehistoric China. Her dissertation focuses on plant food practices in the north borderland region of China (northern Shaanxi and south-central Inner Mongolia) during the Neolithic period by employing archaeobotanical approaches. In addition, she has been engaged in collaborative projects from other regions in China and beyond (Erlitou, Taiwan, Honduras, etc.) and a series of experimental studies.
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Julia Hirsch
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2021
BioJulia 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. -
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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Elise Huerta
Ph.D. Student in Chinese, admitted Autumn 2015
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesBioElise Huerta is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures with a concentration in modern Chinese literature and a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Untouchable: On the Cultural Politics of Hands in Modern China, aims to produce new understandings of intimacy, alienation, labor, and violence in the modern era through the interdisciplinary study of tactile culture. The project explores the many powers invested in human hands through narrative, taking a particular interest in the discourses and social mechanisms that contribute to the construction of "untouchable" people and groups. Her research will be supported by a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2021-2022 and an AAUW American Fellowship in 2022-2023.
As an educator, Huerta is committed to supporting student success while promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. She currently serves as a graduate mentor through the First-Generation and/or Low-Income (FLI) and Enhancing Diversity in Education (EDGE) programs at Stanford. She is a published Chinese to English translator and holds a BA in Chinese with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. -
Johannes Junge Ruhland
Ph.D. Student in French, admitted Autumn 2018
BioHello!
I am a scholar of medieval literature in Old French, Old Occitan, and Franco-Italian, and I focus on literature from before c. 1350. I have gradually come to adopt a “manuscript-first” approach to medieval literature, as I try to understand the implications of reading from manuscripts. I am also the Assistant Director for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford (AY 22-23).
My PhD dissertation, titled Thought Laboratories: Incongruence in Vernacular Multi-Text Manuscripts before 1350, explores the affordances of manuscript-first approaches by developing incongruence as a critical category for the interpretation of multi-text manuscripts. Incongruence, which I define as the dissonance in theme, tone, or logic between two or more texts, has proven useful in at least two respects. First, it allows to bypass the scholarly habit of looking for coherence and unity in multi-text manuscripts, and proposes to focus on elements that resonate with widespread habits of dialectical thinking. Second, it offers an angle through which to consider textually and codicologically challenging codices. While caution is needed when examining composite manuscripts and when dealing with “miscellaneous” books, incongruence nonetheless provides a more varied range of approaches through which to understand how these compilations could be read as compilations of several texts. With the notion of “thought laboratories,” I describe one way in which incongruence seems to have been deployed: for the creation of sustained thought experiments on the part of readers. You can read a text-based attempt at developing this mechanism in my article, “The Challenge of Incongruence in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour” (Exemplaria 33.2).
A straight line connects my MA research, conducted at King’s College London, with my current work on manuscripts of history. Building on my PhD dissertation work on incongruence in historiographical multi-text manuscripts, I am now preparing an article and editing a volume of essays on “making history with manuscripts,” which consider the implications of reading history in manuscript codices—with illuminations, diagrams, layout, touch and sight, compilation, and adaptation impacting the readers’ encounter with historical narratives. A very early piece showcasing my thinking on the topic appears in “The Manuscript as Agent” (New Medieval Literatures 21), and more is forthcoming in “Voices on Parchment: Who Speaks in Historiographical Multi-Text Manuscripts?”
Lastly, my work on Richard de Fournival has led me onto debate literature as it appears in texts and especially manuscripts. In what I hope will become my first monograph, I will examine debate as a form that allows participants to deploy their thinking in set directions, and that therefore functions as a technology for thought. Whereas much scholarship has rightly emphasized that debates are governed by game-like rules that determine how participants are to engage—and event what they can say—I also think there is room to rethink what fixed forms enable in terms of personal involvement. A preliminary piece delineating the corpus of pre-1330 debate literature in texts and manuscripts is forthcoming under the title “The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut.”
One of my favourite aspects of the PhD program is the possibility to teach. I have taught French language (novice through advanced), French literature, and German conversation, with more French literature courses to come. I value improvement over achievement, and I derive great satisfaction from working with my students towards reaching their learning goals. I am a certified tester with ACTFL.
Please visit my Academia.edu profile (link on the side) for a list of publications, presentations, and creative commons teaching materials, and drop me an email if you would like to discuss any of the above.
