School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 2,001-2,100 of 2,207 Results
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Barbara L. Voss
Professor of Anthropology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a historical archaeologist who studies the dynamics and outcomes of transnational cultural encounters: How did diverse groups of people, who previously had little knowledge of each other, navigate the challenges and opportunities of abrupt and sustained interactions caused by colonialism, conflict, and migration? I approach this question through fine-grained, site-specific investigations coupled with broad-scale comparative and collaborative research programs.
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Anthony Wagner
Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCognitive neuroscience of memory and cognitive/executive control in young and older adults. Research interests include encoding and retrieval mechanisms; interactions between declarative, nondeclarative, and working memory; forms of cognitive control; neurocognitive aging; functional organization of prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and the medial temporal lobe; assessed by functional MRI, scalp and intracranial EEG, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
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Virginia Walbot
Professor of Biology, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur current focus is on maize anther development to understand how cell fate is specified. We discovered that hypoxia triggers specification of the archesporial (pre-meiotic) cells, and that these cells secrete a small protein MAC1 that patterns the adjacent soma to differentiate as endothecial and secondary parietal cell types. We also discovered a novel class of small RNA: 21-nt and 24-nt phasiRNAs that are exceptionally abundant in anthers and exhibit strict spatiotemporal dynamics.
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Andrew G. Walder
Denise O'Leary & Kent Thiry Professor of the Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMarket reforms in China; and political movements in China during the Cultural Revolution.
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Camille Walker
Program Associate, Science, Technology and Society
Current Role at StanfordProgram Associate, Science, Technology, and Society
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John J. Walker
Technology Administrator, JSK Journalism Fellowships
BioJohn J. Walker is technical administrator for the JSK Journalism Fellowships. His forward thinking nature makes JSK one of the most technologically adaptable programs on campus.
He manages all the software and digital infrastructure that keeps the fellowship running and accessible to applicants and collaborators from around the world and within the Stanford community. This includes the fellowship application platform, the JSK website and the various tools the program uses to communicate and collaborate.
John started working at Stanford in 1999. Previously he was web administrator for the Department of Communication and the technical director of the Political Communication Lab. There he created experimental manipulations for social science research, like testing people’s responses to political ads. Before Stanford, he worked at Sun Microsystems as a software developer.
John has a master’s degree in communication from Stanford, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees in computer science from the University of California at Riverside. -
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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Greg Walton
Professor of Psychology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research examines the nature of self and identity, often in the context of academic motivation and achievement. I'm interested in social factors relevant to motivation, in stereotypes and group differences in school achievement, and in social-psychological interventions to raise achievement and narrow group differences.
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Brian A. Wandell
Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering, of Ophthalmology and at the Graduate School of Education
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsModels and measures of the human visual system. The brain pathways essential for reading development. Diffusion tensor imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and computational modeling of visual perception and brain processes. Image systems simulations of optics and sensors and image processing. Data and computation management for reproducible research.
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Ban Wang
William Haas Professor of Chinese Studies
BioWilliam Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University
Departments of East Asian Languages and Comparative Literature
Yangtze River Chair Professor, Simian Institute of Advanced Study,
East China Normal University -
Ge Wang
Associate Professor of Music, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science
BioGe Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He specializes in the art of design and computer music — researching programming languages and interactive software design for music, interaction design, mobile music, laptop orchestras, expressive design of virtual reality, aesthetics of music technology design, and education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the author of the ChucK music programming language, the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk). Ge is also the Co-founder of Smule (reaching over 200 million users), and the designer of the iPhone's Ocarina and Magic Piano. Ge is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and the author of ARTFUL DESIGN: TECHNOLOGY IN SEARCH OF THE SUBLIME—a book on design and technology, art and life‚ published by Stanford University Press in 2018 (see https://artful.design/)
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Nancy Ewen Wang
Professor of Emergency Medicine (Pediatrics), Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly Interests- Disparities in Emergency Medical Services for children.
- Efficacy of novel interventions for pediatric access to care.
- Teaching and supporting community-initiated interventions and programs internationally. -
Michael Wara
Senior Research Scholar
BioMichael Wara is a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy.
Wara is Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment as well as Senior Director for Policy at the Sustainability Accelerator within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Wara organizes and manages cross-functional teams of post docs, legal fellows and graduate students that provide fact-based, bipartisan, technical and legal assistance to policymakers, environmental justice advocates, and tribes engaged in the development of novel climate and energy law and regulation. He also facilitates the connection of Stanford faculty with cutting edge policy debates on climate, energy and climate impacts, leveraging Stanford’s energy, climate and natural resource expertise to craft real world solutions to these challenges.
Wara’s legal and policy scholarship focuses on wildfire, climate mitigation, energy innovation, and regulated industries. He collaborates with economists, engineers and scientists in research on the design and evaluation of technical and regulatory solutions to society's climate and energy challenges.
Wara has served as a Wildfire Commissioner for the California, as a member of the California Catastrophe Council, the oversight body of the California Wildfire Fund, as a consultant to the Senate pro Tem on wildfire issues, and as a consultant to CPUC and OEIS on utility wildfire risk management. Wara has served on multiple National Academy of Sciences and California Council on Science and Technology reports. He is also a member of the Tamalpais Design Review Board.
Prior to joining Woods, Wara was an associate professor at Stanford Law School and an associate in Holland & Knight’s government practice. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. in Ocean Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz. -
Gregory Watkins
Lecturer
BioGreg has taught in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) since 2002. He has a BA in Social Theory (a self-designed major) from Stanford, with Honors in Humanities, an MFA in Film Production from UCLA, and a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Humanities from Stanford, also from Stanford. Greg's research interests hover around the intersection of film and religion, and he continues to work on a variety of film projects.
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Allen S. Weiner
Senior Lecturer in Law
BioAllen S. Weiner is an international legal scholar with expertise in such wide-ranging fields as international and national security law, the law of war, international conflict resolution, and international criminal law (including transitional justice). His scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and situations of widespread humanitarian atrocities. He also explores assertions by states of “war powers” under international law, domestic law, and just war theory in the context of asymmetric armed conflicts between states and nonstate armed groups and the response to terrorism. In the realm of international conflict resolution, his highly multidisciplinary work analyzes the barriers to resolving violent political conflicts, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weiner’s scholarship is deeply informed by experience; he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade advising government policymakers, negotiating international agreements, and representing the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.
Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. He was a law clerk to Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. -
Barry R. Weingast
Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioBarry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair, Department of Political Science, from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics. -
Jeremy Weinstein
Kleinheinz Family Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCivil War, Ethnic Politics, Political Economy of Development, Democracy and Accountability, Africa
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Henry Jin Weng
Undergraduate, Math and Computational Science
Undergraduate, MathematicsBioHenry Weng is an undergraduate at Stanford studying computer science, economics, and mathematics with a focus on reinforcement learning and market design. Henry previously took a gap year to co-found Hazel, an AI relationship manager for real estate agents, as a part of Pear VC's accelerator. Henry enjoys building useful and delightful things, exploring, meeting new people, and collecting new ways of thinking.
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Lynn Marie Westphal, M.D.
Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility) at Stanford University Medical Center, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsInfertility, fertility preservation, oocyte cryopreservation
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John Weyant
Professor (Research) of Management Science and Engineering, of Energy Science Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioJohn P. Weyant is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Director of the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy and an an affiliated faculty member of the Stanford School of Earth, Environment and Energy Sciences, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. His current research focuses on analysis of multi-sector, multi-region coupled human and earth systems dynamics, global change systems analysis, energy technology assessment, and models for strategic planning.
Weyant was a founder and serves as chairman of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), a seventeen-year old collaboration among over 60 member institutions from around the world. He has been an active adviser to the United Nations, the European Commission, U.S.Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of State, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In California, he has been and adviser to the California Air Resources, the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission..
Weyant was awarded the US Association for Energy Economics’ 2008 Adelmann-Frankel award for unique and innovative contributions to the field of energy economics and the award for outstanding lifetime contributions to the Profession for 2017 from the International Association for Energy Economics, and a Life Time Achievement award from the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium in 2018. Weyant was honored in 2007 as a major contributor to the Nobel Peace prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2008 by Chairman Mary Nichols for contributions to the to the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee on AB 32.
Fields of Specialization:
Energy/Environmental Policy Analysis, Strategic Planning
Interests:
Overall goal is to accelerate the use of systems models at state, country, and global scales, aiming to provide the best available information and insights to government and private-sector decision makers. Specific areas include energy, climate change, and sustainable development policy, including emerging technologies and market design alternatives. Draws on concepts and techniques from science and engineering fundamentals (e.g., thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science, and electrical power systems), operations research, economics, finance, and decision theory. -
Lyris Wiedemann
Senior Lecturer in the Language Center
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research interests include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, acquisition of cognate languages, development of cultural competence, and translation. I am one of the creators of the international symposium on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: Acquisition and Teaching, which had its fifth edition in 2014, and an author and editor of several scholarly articles and books. My current focus is on the acquisition of Portuguese by speakers of Spanish and other Romance languages.
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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). -
Gail Wight
Professor of Art and Art History, Emerita
BioGail Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. She has an extensive international exhibition record, with over a dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Her work is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.
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Michael Wilcox
Senior Lecturer of Comp Studies Race Ethnicity
BioMichael Wilcox joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University in 2001 as an Assistant Professor. His dissertation, entitled "The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Communities of Resistance, Ethnic Conflict and Alliance Formation Among Upper Rio Grande Pueblos," articulates the social consequences of subordination, and explores the processes of boundary maintenance at both regional and communal levels. During his graduate studies at Harvard, he was very involved in strengthening the Harvard University Native American Program and in designing and teaching award-winning courses in Native American Studies.
His recent publications include: The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact, University of California Press (2009) (book blog at: http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/?p=5000); Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous Response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; Journal of Social Archaeology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 92-117 (2010); Saving Indigenous Peoples From Ourselves: Separate but Equal Archaeology is Not Scientific Archaeology", American Antiquity 75(2), 2010; NAGPRA and Indigenous Peoples: The Social Context, Controversies and the Transformation of American Archaeology, in Voices in American Archaeology: 75th Anniversary Volume of the Society for American Archaeology, edited by Wendy Ashmore, Dorothy Lippert, and Barbara J. Mills (2010).
Professor Wilcox's main research interests include Native American ethnohistory in the American Southwest; the history of Pueblo Peoples in New Mexico; Indigenous Archaeology; ethnic identity and conflict; DNA, race and cultural identity in archaeology and popular culture; and the political and historical relationships between Native Americans, anthropologists and archaeologists. -
Lois Vevine Williams
Undergraduate, Human Biology
BioProspective Human Biology major, East Asian Studies minor. Questbridge Scholar.
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Zach Williams
Lecturer
BioZach Williams' debut story collection, Beautiful Days, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2024. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run” was one of three that won The Paris Review a 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. A Stegner Fellow from 2021-2023, he is now a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford.
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John Willinsky
Khosla Family Professor, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI work under the auspices of the Public Knowledge Project which is focused on extending access to, and the accessibility of, research and scholarship. The research is on student, professional, and public access to this educational resource, while PKP also engages in developing and designing open source software (free) publishing systems to improve the public and scholarly quality of peer-reviewed journals. This also involves international collaborations in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia are aimed at helping to better understand and strengthen scholarly publishing in those areas.
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Sam Wineburg
Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDistinguishing what is true in our current digital morass; the teaching and learning of history
Latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, "Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online."
How young people make decisions about what to believe on the Internet.
New forms of assessment to measure digital literacy
The creation of Web-based environments for the learning and teaching of history -
Terry Winograd
Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus
BioProfessor Winograd's focus is on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, which recently celebrated it's 20th anniversary. He is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the "d.school") and on the faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)
Winograd was a founding member and past president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. He has advised a number of companies started by his students, including Google. In 2011 he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. -
Tom Winterbottom
Advanced Lecturer
BioI teach Spanish for the Stanford Language Center in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages and I also teach classes for the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Currently I teach a wide range of first- and second-year Spanish classes and lead courses on 20th- and 21st-century Brazilian cultural history. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford in 2015 in Iberian and Latin American Cultures and have published a cultural history of Rio de Janeiro (2016) as well as book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, essays, and journalism. In recent years, I've also taught Portuguese language as well courses on modern Latin American literature and cinema.
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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. -
Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH
Richard E. Behrman, MD, Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Health Policy and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
On Leave from 02/01/2024 To 12/20/2024Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHe is a health policy and outcomes researcher whose work has focused on children's health; health-outcomes disparities by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; the interaction of genetics and the environment as these factors influence child and maternal health; and the impact of medical technology on disparities in health outcomes.
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Laura Wittman
Associate Professor of French and Italian
BioLaura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature from a comparative perspective. She is interested in how modernity articulates new relationships between religious experience, embodiment, mortality, health, and politics, and how these are mediated by literary and artistic creations.
Her book, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (University of Toronto Press, 2011) was awarded the Marraro Award of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for 2012. It explores the creation and reception of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – an Italian, French, and British invention at the end of the First World War – as an emblem for modern mourning, from a cultural, historical, and literary perspective. It draws on literary and filmic evocations of the Unknown Soldier, as well as archival materials, to show that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is not pro-war, nationalist, or even proto-Fascist. Rather, it is a monument that heals trauma in two ways: first, it refuses facile consolations, and forcefully dramatizes the fact that suffering cannot be spiritualized or justified by any ideology; second, it rejects despair by enacting, through the concreteness of a particular body, a human solidarity in suffering that commands respect. Anticipating recent analyses of PTSD, the Memorial shows that when traumatic events are relived in a ritual, embodied, empathetic setting, healing occurs not via analysis but via symbolic communication and transmission of emotion.
Laura Wittman is the editor of a special issue of the Romanic Review entitled Italy and France: Imagined Geographies (2006), as well as the co-editor of an anthology of Futurist manifestos and literary works, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009). She has published articles on d’Annunzio, Marinetti, Fogazzaro, Ungaretti, Montale, Sereni, and Merini, as well as on decadent-era culture and Italian cinema. With Jon Snyder and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, she recently co-edited a special issue of California Italian Studies on "The Sacred in Italian Culture" (2015).
She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism," an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term "mystic without God" in the works of Gabriele d'Annununzio and Paul Valéry.
In Spring 2009, she was organizer of the California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies (CICIS) Annual Conference, held at the Stanford Humanities Center; she is currently the organizer of the upcoming CICIS 2019 conference, also to be held at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was also organizer of the interdisciplinary conference on Language, Literature, and Mysticism held at the Stanford Humanities Center on 15 and 16 October 2010.
She is currently working on a new book entitled Lazarus' Silence that explores visions of the afterlife and visits to the underworld in modern literature and culture, as a window toward our changing attitudes toward death, accepting our mortality, and accompanying the dying. -
Frank Wolak
Holbrook Working Professor of Price Theory and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioFrank A. Wolak is the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics and the Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. His research and teaching focuses on design, performance, and monitoring of energy and environmental markets. He served as Chair of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator and was a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee (EMAC) for California’s Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances.
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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. -
Alex Woloch
Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioAlex Woloch received his B.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature. He teaches and writes about literary criticism, narrative theory, the history of the novel, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is the author of The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton UP, 2003), which attempts to reestablish the centrality of characterization — the fictional representation of human beings — within narrative poetics. He is also the author of Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard UP, 2016), which takes up the literature-and-politics question through a close reading of George Orwell’s generically experimental non-fiction prose. A new book in progress, provisionally entitled Partial Representation, will consider the complicated relationship between realism and form in a variety of media, genres and texts. This book will focus on the paradoxical ways in which form is at once necessary, and inimical, to representation. Woloch is also the co-editor, with Peter Brooks of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Yale UP, 2000).
