School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 41-60 of 75 Results
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Ana Raquel Minian Andjel
Associate Professor of History
BioAna Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Her first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) explores how unauthorized migration from Mexico to the United States became an entrenched phenomenon in the years between 1965 and 1986. In this period, Mexican policymakers, US authorities, and Mexican communities of high out-migration came to reject the long-term presence of Mexican working-class men. In Mexico, the country’s top politicians began to view men’s migration with favor as a way of alleviating national economic problems. In the United States, migrants were classified as “illegal aliens.” Migrants’ permanent residence was also denied at the local level. When they resided in Mexico, their communities pressured them to head north to make money. But when they lived in the United States, their families insisted that they return home. As a result migrants described themselves as being “from neither here nor there” (“Ni de aquí ni de allá”). They responded to their situation by engaging in circular, undocumented migration and by creating their own cartographies of belonging. Migrants resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents through the remittances they sent; they countered their illegality in the United States by establishing that they deserved constitutional rights; and they diminished the pressures enacted by their communities by reconfiguring the very meaning of community life. These efforts provided migrants with at least partial inclusion in the multiple locales in which they lived; however, that inclusion was only possible because they resided, at least part of their time, in the United States. In 1986, the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which made it more difficult to cross the border. By then, however, undocumented migration had already become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Thereafter, migrants settled permanently in the United States and dared not return to Mexico. Rather than feeling “pushed” from all the spaces in which they resided, they now felt trapped in the United States, which they started calling “La Jaula de Oro” (The Golden Cage).
A version of a chapter of my book entitled “De Terruño a Terruño: Re-imagining Belonging through Clubes Sociales,” was published in the Journal of American History in June 2017. It analyzes the growth of migrant organizations that sent aid to Mexico from Los Angeles between the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. Beyond work from my book, I also published “‘Indiscriminate and Shameless Sex’: The Strategic Use of Sexuality by the United Farm Workers” in American Quarterly in 2013. This article examines the ways in which the union used a sexual discourse to propagate its labor goals.
Minian's second book project, No Man’s Lands: North American Migration and the Remaking of Peoples and Places, examines how during the late Cold War and its aftermath, U.S. officials created new spaces and territories designed to prevent Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean migrants from entering the United States. Rather than a thought-out and coherent project, these various spatial enterprises were designed haphazardly in response to particular incidents and migrations.
Minian is also writing a history about immigration detention in the United States -
Harold Mooney
Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor in Environmental Biology, Emeritus
BioStanford ecologist Harold “Hal” Mooney is the Paul S. Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Science’s Department of Biology and senior fellow, emeritus, with the Stanford Woods Institute as well as the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Mooney helped pioneer the field of physiological ecology and is an internationally recognized expert on environmental sciences. Through his six-decade academic career, Mooney has demonstrated how plant species and groups of species respond to their environments and developed research methodologies for assessing how plants interact with their biotic environments. To date he has authored more than 400 scientific books, papers and articles.
Mooney's recent research focuses on assessing the impacts of global environmental change on terrestrial ecosystems, especially on ecosystem function, productivity and biodiversity. Recent research includes studying the environmental and social consequences of industrialized animal production systems and examining factors that promote the invasion of non-indigenous plant species.
Mooney has played an international leadership role in numerous research settings, especially with problems related to biodiversity, invasive species, global warming and Mediterranean climates. In addition, he has been active in building up worldwide communities and networks of ecologists and scientists in other disciplines and arranging international conferences on the environment. He played a central role in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), building up an international organization of scientists and having an influential part in setting the guidelines for the formulation of environmental policies. He also has advanced numerous international research programs as Secretary General and Vice-President of the International Council for Science (ICSU).
Mooney earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1960 and started as an assistant professor at UCLA that same year. In 1968 he was recruited to Stanford University, where he was later appointed the Paul S. Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology in the School of Humanities and Science’s Department of Biology. A senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute as well as the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Mooney has led a wide range of national and international scientific activities related to environment and conservation.
Notable roles included coordinating the 1995 Global Biodiversity Assessment, co-chairing the Assessment Panel of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, establishing and leading the Global Invasive Species Program and serving as lead review editor for the ongoing global assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. His many accolades and awards include the 1990 ECI Prize in terrestrial ecology, the 1992 Max Planck Research Award in biosciences, the 1996 Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, the 2000 Nevada Medal, the 2002 Blue Planet Prize, the 2007 Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology, the 2008 Tyler Prize, the 2008 BBVA Foundation Award for Biodiversity Conservation, and the 2010 Volvo Environment Prize. -
Paula M. L. Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioMoya is currently the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE).
She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).
Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.
At Stanford, Moya has served as the Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).
Moya is a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.
Moya has been a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. -
Rosamond Naylor
William Wrigley Professor, Professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute, at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Professor, by courtesy, of Economics and of Earth System Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch Activities:
My research focuses on the environmental and equity dimensions of intensive food production systems, and the food security dimensions of low-input systems. I have been involved in a number of field-level research projects around the world and have published widely on issues related to climate impacts on agriculture, distributed irrigation systems for diversified cropping, nutrient use and loss in agriculture, biotechnology, aquaculture and livestock production, biofuels development, food price volatility, and food policy analysis.
Teaching Activities:
I teach courses on the world food economy, food and security, aquaculture science and policy, human society and environmental change, and food-water-health linkages. These courses are offered to graduate and undergraduate students through the departments of Earth System Science, Economics, History, and International Relations.
Professional Activities:
William Wrigley Professor of Earth Science (2015 - Present); Professor in Earth System Science (2009-present); Director, Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment (2005-2018); Associate Professor of Economics by courtesy (2000-present); William Wrigley Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment (2007-2015); Trustee, The Nature Conservancy CA program (2012-present); Member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics in Stockholm (2011-present), for the Aspen Global Change Institute (2011-present), and for the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program (2012-present); Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in Environmental Science and Public Policy (1999); Pew Fellow in Conservation and the Environment (1994). Associate Editor for the Journal on Food Security (2012-present). Editorial board member for Aquaculture-Environment Interactions (2009-present) and Global Food Security (2012-present). -
Roger Noll
Professor of Economics, Emeritus
BioRoger G. Noll is professor of economics emeritus at Stanford University. Noll also is a Senior Fellow and member of the Advisory Board at the American Antitrust Institute. Noll received a B.S. with honors in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph. D. in economics from Harvard University. Prior to joining Stanford, Noll was a Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Institute Professor of Social Science and Chair of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. At Stanford, Noll served as Associate Dean for Social Sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Director of the Public Policy Program, and Senior Fellow in the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research where he also was Director of the Program in Regulatory Policy and Director of the Stanford Center for International Development.
Noll is the author or co-author of seventeen books and over three hundred articles and reviews. His primary research interests include technology policy; antitrust, regulation and privatization policies in both advanced and developing economies; economic aspects of public law (administrative law, judicial processes, and statutory interpretation); and the economics of sports and entertainment. Among Noll’s published books are Economic Aspects of Television Regulation (1973), Government and the Sports Business (1974), The Technology Pork Barrel (1991), Constitutional Reform in California (1995), Sports, Jobs and Taxes (1997), Challenges to Research Universities (1998), and Economic Reform in India (2013).
Noll has been a member of the advisory boards of the U.S. Department of Energy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and National Science Foundation. He also has been a member of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy of the National Research Council, and of the California Council on Science and Technology.
Noll has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the annual book award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the Rhodes Prize for undergraduate education at Stanford, the Distinguished Service Award of the Public Utilities Research Center, the Alfred E. Kahn Distinguished Career Award from the American Antitrust Institute, the Distinguished Member Award from the Transportation and Public Utilities Group of the American Economic Association, Economist of the Year from Global Competition Review, and the American Antitrust Institute award for Distinguished Achievement by an Economist in Antitrust Litigation. -
Leonard Ortolano
UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering in Urban and Regional Planning, Emeritus
BioOrtolano is concerned with environmental and water resources policy and planning. His research stresses environmental policy implementation in developing countries and the role of non-governmental organizations in environmental management. His recent interests center on corporate environmental management.
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Amado Padilla
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Education
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent projects include: (a) the development of models of ethnic identity that incorporate social cognition theory and social identity; (b)acculturation stress and mental health status across three generations of Latinos; (c) home, school and community protective factors that empower Latino students to succeed academically; (d) learning of Mandarin by high school students in summer intensive programs vs. students in regular high school world language classes; and (e) student language and academic content learning in a Mandarin/English dual language immersion program.
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Helen Quinn
Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Emerita
BioHelen Quinn received her Ph.D in physics at Stanford in 1967. She has taught physics at both Harvard and Stanford. Dr. Quinn work as a particle physicist has been honored by the Dirac Medal (from the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy) and the Klein Medal (from The Swedish National Academy of Sciences and Stockholm University) as well as the Sakurai Prize (from the American Physical Society), the Compton medal (from the American Institute of Physics, awarded once every 4 years) and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics (from the Franklin Institute). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science and the American Philosophical Society. She is a Fellow and former president of the American Physical Society. She is originally from Australia and is an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia.
Dr. Quinn has been active in science education for some years, and since her retirement in 2010 this has been her major activity. She was a founding member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) which produced a well-known standard-model poster for schools in 1987 (see photo). She served as Chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Science Education (BOSE) from 2009-2014. She was as a member of the BOSE study committee that developed the report “Taking Science to School” and chaired the committee for the “Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which is the basis of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar standards now adopted by about 30 states in the US, and has been influential internationally as well. She also contributed to follow-up NRC studies on assessment and implementation of NGSS. From 2015-2018 Helen served at the request of the President of Ecuador as a member of the “Comision Gestora” to help plan and guide the initial development of the National University of Education of Ecuador. -
Joan Ramon Resina
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and of Comparative Literature
BioProfessor Resina specializes in modern European literatures and cultures with an emphasis on the Spanish and Catalan traditions. He is Director of the Iberian Studies Program, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Professor Resina is most recently the author of The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. This book is a reflection on the political use of historical memory focusing on the case of Spain. It analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origin and transmission of political violence and its endurance in the form of “negationism”. Some chapters consider “traumatic” phenomena, such as the bombing of Guernica, the Republican exile, the destruction of Catalan society, and the Holocaust. The book engages controversial issues, such as the relation between memory and imputation, the obstacles to reconciliation, and the problems arising from the existence of not only different but also conflicting memories about the past. Another recent book is Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles. Toronto University Press, 2017, which received the North American Catalan Society award for best book on Catalan Studies in 2019. This book condenses Pla's 47-volume work into 11 thematic units devoted to a central aspect of Pla's oeuvre. Resina explores the modalities of Pla's writing: stylistic, phenomenological, political, his relation to language, fiction, food, and landscape, and his approach to sexuality, women, and death. It introduces the reader to the colorful world of Catalonia's greatest 20th century writer through the author's gaze. Pla was a privileged observer of some of the crucial events of the 20th century, but he also captured the sensual infrastructure of his own country by recording every aspect of its reality.
Previous books include Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book, Resina lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies, contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions. Another publication since joining Stanford is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image since the late 19th century through the 20th century through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period.
Resina has edited eleven collections of essays on varied topics, most recently Inscribed Identities: Writing as Self-Realization. Routledge, 2019, and Repetition, Recurrence, Returns, Lexington Books, 2019.
He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to a large number critical volumes. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Editor of Diacritics. For several years he has been a regular contributor to the Barcelona daily press. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities, and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowships, and a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Cologne.. -
John Rick
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus
BioJohn Rick’s research focuses on prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers and initial hierarchical societies, stone tool analysis and digital methodologies, Latin America, Southwestern U.S. Rick’s major research efforts have included long-term projects studying early hunting societies of the high altitude puna grasslands of central Peru, and currently he directs a major research project at the monumental World Heritage site of Chavín de Huántar aimed at exploring the foundations of authority in the central Andes. Other field projects include work on early agricultural villages in the American Southwest, and a recently-initiated project on the Preclassic and Early Classic archaeology of the Guatemalan highlands near Panajachel, Atitlan. Current emphasis is on employing dimensional analytical digital techniques to the study of landscape and architecture, and on exploring the contexts and motivations for the development of sociopolitical inequalities.
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Jonathan Rosa
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop insights into ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first offers frameworks for understanding ethnoracial contradictions across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.
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Michael Rosenfeld
Professor of Sociology
BioI am a social demographer who studies race, ethnicity, and family structure, the family's effect on children, and the history of the family. I am interested in mate selection as a social as well as a personal process.
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Jorge Ruffinelli-Altesor
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Emeritus
BioProfessor Jorge Ruffinelli (Uruguay), a disciple of Angel Rama at the University of Uruguay, followed him as Director of the literary section of the seminal Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1968. In 1973 he was Adjunct Professor of the Latin American literature program (directed by Noé Jitrik) at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1974 he emigrated to México, where he was appointed Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias at the Universidad Veracruzana, a position he held for for twelve years. At the Universidad Veracruzana he was also Professor in the school of Letters, and collaborated in all the major cultural journals and newspapers of the Latin American continent. In 1986 he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary journal Texto crítico for twelve years. A member of various international editorial boards, in the United States he has directed the journal Nuevo texto crítico since 1987.
He has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism and more than five hundred articles, critical notes and reviews in journals throughout the world. A recognized authority on Onetti, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Latin American literary history, during the nineties his critical work has centered on Latin American cinema. In 1993 he filmed a documentary on Augusto Monterroso for which he interviewed major Mexican writers and critics. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles on feature films from and about Latin America. His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968, a project that analyzes the work, marketing, and reception of over more than fifty authors (Ana Solari, Milagros Socorro, Karla Suarez, Mayra Santos, David Toscana, Rodrigo Fresan, Juan Forn, Martin Kohan, Jorge Vopli, among others). His teaching centers on the intersection of the interests above and cultural politics. -
Jose Saldivar
Leon Sloss, Jr. Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioJosé David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.
He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012),coeditor (with Monica Hanna and Jennifer Harford Vargas) of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016) coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).
Additionally, he has published numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Studies, American Literary History, The Americas Review, Revista Casa de las Américas, Daedalus, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Global South. He has served on the editorial boards of Duke University Press, the University of California Press, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals American Literary History, The Global South, Aztlan, and World Knowledges Otherwise. He has received personal research grants from The Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the William Rice Kimball Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (invitation for a future visit).
His teaching is divided evenly between graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and some of his undergraduate courses are cross-listed in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
In 2003, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Western Literature Association; in 2005, he received the Chicano Scholar of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association; in 2007 he received the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the University of California, Berkeley; and in 2016, he was the winner of the American Literature Society’s highest honor, the Jay B. Hubbell Medal. The medal is sponsored by the American Literature Society, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, and is awarded annually to one “scholar whose lifetime of scholarly work has significantly advanced the study of American literature.” . Before coming to Stanford in January 2010, Saldívar was the Class of 1942 Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. -
Ramon Saldivar
Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of English, of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research is concerned with the relationships among race, form, genre, representing what Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently term the “post-postmodern.” In the latest version of this research presented at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin I use Sesshu Foster's "Atomik Aztex" as an example twenty-first century racial imaginaries. Part fantasy, part hallucinatory sur-realism, part muckraking novel in the grand realist protest tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), part historical novel in the mode of Vassily Grossman’s great Stalinist era masterpiece, Life & Fate (1980) set during the battle of Stalingrad, part ethnographic history about religious, military, and social structure of the pre-Columbian Aztec (Nahua, Mexica) world, part LA noir, and wholly Science Fiction alternative and counterfactual history, it exemplifies many of the criteria of the “post-postmodern.” Moreover, in addition to this range of formal matters, Atomik Aztex is concerned with two other topics:
•a reconceptualization of the way that race affects the formations of history, and
•the reshaping of the form of the novel in order to represent that reconceptualization.
With eighty-two characters populating the story, itself a plotted compendium of at least two radically separate yet intertwined universes of action, in a continually shifting movement from past, present, and future times, Atomik Aztex is a radical experiment in novelistic form. Using the tools of quantitative formalism developed for literary use by the Stanford University Literary Lab, I wish to show how the work of the computational humanities, in conjunction with traditional hermeneutic methods of literary analysis can help us understand the radical turn of contemporary American fiction toward speculative realism.
