School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 41-60 of 616 Results

  • Vivian Brates

    Vivian Brates

    Advanced Lecturer, Language Ctr

    BioVivian Brates is an Advanced Lecturer in the Stanford Language Center, where she teaches Spanish language and culture courses with a particular emphasis on community-engaged learning. Since 2011, she has designed and taught a portfolio of courses that integrate advanced language learning with issues of migration, access to health care, and human rights through long-term partnerships with community organizations.

    She believes that learning another language is ultimately about building understanding across cultures and seeing the world through other people's experiences and perspectives. In her community-engaged courses, students strengthen their language proficiency, intercultural competence, and communication skills by engaging directly with Spanish-speaking communities. Along the way, they gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic, cultural, and structural barriers that shape people's opportunities and experiences. Whether they pursue careers in medicine, law, education, engineering, business, research, or public service, her goal is to help students communicate thoughtfully across cultures and engage with others with empathy, humility, and respect.

    Over the years, her courses have partnered with organizations including the International Institute of the Bay Area, the CARA Pro Bono Project, Al Otro Lado, Freedom for Immigrants, One Life (Una Vida) Counseling Services, UG2 campus service workers at Stanford, Sequoia High School's Newcomer Program, and Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (CLSEPA).

    Before joining Stanford, Vivian worked as a Human Rights Observer and Election Monitor with the United Nations and the Organization of American States in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Guatemala, and later as an advocate and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Those experiences continue to shape her teaching and her commitment to connecting academic learning with meaningful community engagement.

    Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Vivian attended the University of Buenos Aires before earning an M.A. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies with a concentration in Economic Development from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

  • Michael Bratman

    Michael Bratman

    U. G. and Abbie Birch Durfee Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhilosophy of action, where this includes issues about individual agency over time, social and institutional organization and agency, and practical rationality.

  • Joan Bresnan

    Joan Bresnan

    Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita

    BioAvailable at https://web.stanford.edu/~bresnan/

  • Jennifer DeVere Brody

    Jennifer DeVere Brody

    Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies

    BioJennifer DeVere Brody (she/her) holds a B.A. in Victorian Studies from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship and service in African and African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, visual and performance studies have been recognized by numerous awards: a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2023 Virginia Howard Fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, support from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, the Monette-Horwitz Prize for Independent Research Against Homophobia, the Royal Society for Theatre Research, and the Thurgood Marshall Prize for Academics and Community Service among others. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Screen, Text and Performance Quarterly and other journals as well as in numerous edited volumes. Her books include: Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998), Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) and Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis(forthcoming from Duke University Press). She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC when she taught in African American Studies at Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics as well as black feminist theory, black queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. She co-edited, with Nicholas Boggs, the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018). She held the Weinberg College of Board of Visitors Professorship at Northwestern University and has been a tenured professor at six different universities in her thirty year career. Her expertise in Queer Studies fostered her work as co-editor ,with C. Riley Snorton, of the flagship journal GLQ. She serves on the Editorial Board of Transition and key journals in global 19th Century Studies. At Stanford, she served as Chair of the Theater & Performance Studies Department (2012-2015) and Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (2016-2021) where she won a major grant from the Mellon Foundation and developed the original idea for an Institute on Race Studies.

  • Michaela Bronstein

    Michaela Bronstein

    BioWelcome! For current information about me, try my personal website (http://www.michaelabronstein.com/) or my Stanford English page (https://english.stanford.edu/people/michaela-bronstein).

  • Scott Bukatman

    Scott Bukatman

    Professor of Art and Art History

    BioScott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman has been published in abundant journals and anthologies, including October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, Science Fiction Studies, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

    Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins shows how our engagement with Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics also a highly aestheticized encounter with the medium of comics and the materiality of the book. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. His most recent book, Black Panther, part of the 21st Century Film Essentials series (University of Texas Press), explores aspects of the 2018 Ryan Coogler film, including the history of Black superheroes, Black Panther's black body, the Wakandan dream, and the controversies around the Killmonger character.

  • Alyssa Burgart (she/her)

    Alyssa Burgart (she/her)

    Clinical Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine
    Clinical Professor (By courtesy), Pediatrics

    BioWith double board certification in anesthesiology and pediatric anesthesiology and over 20 years of experience in bioethics, Dr. Alyssa Burgart is a unique cross-disciplinary clinician-scholar. Dr. Burgart holds numerous leadership positions, including Associate Director of Pediatric Ethics at the Laurie J. Girand Center for Biomedical Ethics, Medical Director of Ethics for the Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, and physician co-chair of the Stanford Children’s Ethics Committee. She actively supports the Program in Medical Humanities and the Arts and is the Associate Director for Symposium. In the undergraduate school, she serves as affiliate faculty in the Stanford Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

    Dr. Burgart is an expert in difficult conversations and skillfully mediating complex choices with families and healthcare providers. She speaks nationally on bioethics, relationship-centered communication, trauma-informed care, moral distress/moral injury, disability justice, gender equity, and reproductive justice issues.

    Dr. Burgart's unwavering dedication to pediatric trauma mitigation is exemplified in her committed to finding the most successful way for each child to interact with the anesthesia team, ensuring an overall positive experience and reducing the risk of medical trauma. She advocates on behalf of children with unique sensory and behavioral needs. Her clinical focus within pediatric anesthesiology is abdominal solid organ transplant.

    Dr. Burgart's influence in the field of bioethics extends beyond her clinical and academic roles. As an associate editor and digital media editor at the American Journal of Bioethics, her work is instrumental in shaping the discourse on ethical healthcare practices. Her writing, featured in JAMA, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, and Ms. Magazine, and her newsletter, Poppies & Propofol, are all part of her mission to enhance public education on bioethics issues in public life. She frequently engages with journalists to ensure accurate and comprehensive reporting on complex medical ethics issues.

  • Marshall Burke

    Marshall Burke

    Food Security and the Environment Senior Fellow, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences, Senior Fellow at the at the Woods Institute for the Environment, at SIEPR and Professor, by courtesy, of Earth System Science

    BioMarshall Burke is professor of Global Environmental Policy in the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford, a senior fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, all at Stanford. He is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research uses tools from the social and natural sciences to measure environmental change, how society is impacted by this change, and how it can respond. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford. He directs the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab at Stanford, is co-founder of AtlasAI, and co-creator of the Environmental Hazards Adaptation Atlas.

    Prospective students should see my personal and lab webpages, linked at right.

  • Jennifer Burns

    Jennifer Burns

    Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

    BioI am a historian of the twentieth century United States working at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular interest in ideas about the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics.

    My most recent book is Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. This is the first full biography of the influential economist and political figure, and was awarded the 2026 Spengler Prize for the book by the Society for the History of Economics, the 2025 Reagan Book Prize, and was a finalist for the 2024 Hayek Prize. My first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009), was an intellectual biography of the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand.

    I have published articles about the history of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism in a number of academic and popular journals, including Reviews in American History, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Cultural Economy, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Dissent.

    At Stanford I teach courses on modern U.S. history, intellectual history, and the history of economic thought.


    My writing on the history of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism has appeared in a number of academic and popular journals, including Reviews in American History, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Cultural Economy, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Dissent.

    Prospective graduate students: please consult my history department webpage for more information on graduate study. https://history.stanford.edu/people/jennifer-burns

  • Thomas Byers

    Thomas Byers

    Entrepreneurship Professor in the School of Engineering

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsApplied ethics, responsible innovation, and global entrepreneurship education (see http://peak.stanford.edu).

  • Joel Cabrita

    Joel Cabrita

    Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies

    BioJoel Cabrita is a historian of modern Southern Africa who focuses on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and South Africa. She examines the transnational networks of the Southern African region including those which connect Southern Africans to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Her most recent book (The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement, Harvard University Press, 2018) investigates the convergence of evangelical piety, transnational networks and the rise of industrialized societies in both Southern Africa and North America. The People's Zion was awarded the American Society of Church History's Albert C Outler Prize for 2019 https://churchhistory.org/grants-and-awards/ She is also the co-editor of a volume examining the global dimensions of Christian practice, advocating for a shift away from Western Christianity to the lateral connections connecting southern hemisphere religious practitioners (Relocating World Christianity, Brill, 2017).

    Cabrita has a long-standing interest in how Southern Africans used and transformed a range of old and new media forms. Her first book (Text and Authority in the South African Nazaretha Church, Cambridge University Press, 2014) investigates the print culture of a large South African religious organization, while her edited collection (Religion, Media and Marginality in Africa, Ohio University Press, 2018) focuses on the intersection of media, Islam, Christianity and political expression in modern Africa.

    Her current project (under contract with Ohio University Press) is the biography of a pioneering African feminist, Christian Pentecostal pioneer and liberation leader, Regina Gelana Twala (1908 – 1968), who co-founded Swaziland’s first political party in 1960 and introduced the Assemblies of God denomination to the region. Celebrated during her lifetime, Twala’s remarkable story is today largely forgotten, in part a consequence of her untimely death in 1968, one month before Swaziland’s independence. Cabrita’s project considers the radically new perspective a figure such as Twala affords on the contribution of women to Africa’s anti-colonial liberation movements and to evangelical history. The book will probe the politics of memory whereby certain African nationalist and religious icons have been erased from the historical record.

    Cabrita did her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before moving to Stanford, she held permanent posts at SOAS (University of London) and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been recognized by two major early-career research prizes, the British Arts and Humanities Early Career Research Fellowship (2015) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017).

  • Bruce Cain

    Bruce Cain

    Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in the School of Humanities & Sciences, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, at SIEPR, at the Precourt Institute for Energy & Professor of Environmental Social Sciences

    BioBruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000). His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. Some of Professor Cain’s most recent publications include “Malleable Constitutions: Reflections on State Constitutional Design,” coauthored with Roger Noll in University of Texas Law Review, volume 2, 2009; “More or Less: Searching for Regulatory Balance,” in Race, Reform and the Political Process, edited by Heather Gerken, Guy Charles and Michael Kang, CUP, 2011; “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012; and Democracy More or Less (CUP, 2015). He is currently working on problems of environmental governance.

  • Martin Carnoy

    Martin Carnoy

    Lemann Foundation Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearching econometric models of quality of education in Latin America and Southern Africa. Studying changes in university financing and the quality of engineering and science tertiary education in China, India, and Russia.

  • Steven Carter

    Steven Carter

    Yamato Ichihashi Chair in Japanese History and Civilization, Emeritus

    BioResearch Areas:
    - Japanese Poetry, Poetics, and Poetic Culture
    - The Japanese Essay (zuihitsu)
    - Travel Writing
    - Historical Fiction
    - The Relationship between the Social and the Aesthetic