School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 346 Results
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Vera Geranpayeh
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2024
Ph.D. Minor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsVera Geranpayeh is a PhD student in German Studies at Stanford University. Her research examines representations of female subjectivity and Otherness in German literature from the Middle Ages to the present. She analyzes figures whose gendered, epistemic, and embodied difference obstructs narrative progression and resists containment. Drawing on affect theory, queer theory, and feminist narratology she theorizes these characters as excessive—marked by a surplus of knowledge, bodily presence, or moral force that strains and reshapes the text’s architecture. Her work explores how gender operates not only thematically but structurally, driving plot, obstructing closure, and exposing the limits of narrative control. These figures appear as threats to the coherence of patriarchal order, revealing how gendered Otherness can destabilize the very frameworks meant to contain it. She advances feminist literary scholarship by developing a transhistorical framework for understanding how gendered figures of excess persist across genres and periods—not as elements resolved by narrative, but as forms that retain the power to intervene, refract meaning, and haunt narrative itself.
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Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024BioChristopher 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 InterestsCo-existence of Human and Non-Human Elements in a Soundscape
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Zach Haines
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2022
BioZachary 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.
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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. -
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.
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Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
BioKimia 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. -
Elisa Leiva Anderson
Master of Fine Arts Student, Documentary Film and Video
BioElisa is a filmmaker from Santiago, Chile. She is the editor of Towards the Sun, Far from the Center (Berlinale, 2024), the producer and editor of Ripear un Desierto (Nemaf Korea, 2023), and the director of VIEWS (FicValdivia, 2015). She works with archival footage and digital technologies to reflect on displacement, image-making, and the multi-stranded connections—both personal and political—between Chile and the United States.
Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival (NYFF), Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), FIDOCS (Santiago International Film Festival), among others, and have been awarded by the Human Rights Institute of Chile.
In addition to her filmmaking, she has taught short film distribution at the Universidad Católica de Chile, served as Head of International Relations at CinemaChile for five years, and curated short film programs at the Uppsala Film Festival (Sweden) and the Matta Cultural Center (Argentina). -
Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
Workshop 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.
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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.
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Mengyao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2022
Friday Talk student liaison, Classics
Grad student worker, ClassicsBioI 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.
