School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 101-150 of 615 Results

  • Shane Denson

    Shane Denson

    Associate Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication

    BioShane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of three books: Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). He is also co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016).

    See also shanedenson.com for more info.

  • Persi Diaconis

    Persi Diaconis

    Mary V. Sunseri Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch Interests:
    PROBABILITY THEORY
    BAYESIAN STATISTICS
    STATISTICAL COMPUTING
    COMBINATORICS

  • Larry Diamond

    Larry Diamond

    Mosbacher Senior Fellow of Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor, by courtesy, of Sociology and of Political Science

    Current Research and Scholarly Interestsdemocratic development and regime change; U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad; comparative trends in the quality and stability of democracy in developing countries and postcommunist states; and public opinion in new democracies, especially in East Asia

  • Alberto Diaz-Cayeros

    Alberto Diaz-Cayeros

    Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComparative Politics, Political Economy, International Political Economy, Poverty, Rule of Law, Political Party Development

  • Maria Diez Ortega

    Maria Diez Ortega

    Lecturer

    BioDr. María (Mery) Díez-Ortega is an applied linguist and language educator. Her research interests lie in the intersection of second language acquisition, task-based language teaching (TBLT), and language learning and technology. She follows a communicative task-based and project-based learning approach, with an interest in developing intercultural competence. Before coming to Stanford, she taught a variety of Spanish courses at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, at South Puget Sound Community College, and at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. She has also taught college courses in second language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and English for academic purposes.

    Dr. Díez-Ortega received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She earned an MA and an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Spanish Applied Linguistics and Hispanic Cultures and Literatures from the University of Hawai‘i. Dr. Díez-Ortega has published journal articles and book chapters on her various research interests. Moreover, she has received grants and awards for her work in the field of language learning and technology, such as the American Association of Applied Linguistics Graduate Student Award, the Duolingo Dissertation Grant, the CALICO Robert A. Fischer Outstanding Graduate Student Award, among others.

  • David Dill

    David Dill

    Donald E. Knuth Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSecure and reliable blockchain technology at Facebook.

  • Rodolfo Dirzo

    Rodolfo Dirzo

    Associate Dean for Integrative Initiatives in Environmental Justice, Bing Prof in Environmental Science, Professor of Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEcological and evolutionary aspects of plant-animal interactions, largely but not exclusively, in tropical forest ecosystems.
    Conservation biology in tropical ecosystems.
    Studies on biodiversity.
    Education, at all levels, on scientific practice, ecology and biodiversity conservation.

  • Mark Duggan

    Mark Duggan

    Trione Director of SIEPR, Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

    BioMark Duggan is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1999. He currently is a Co-Editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and was previously a Co-Editor at the Journal of Public Economics. Before arriving to Stanford in the summer of 2014, Duggan served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (2011-14), the University of Maryland's Economics Department (2003-11), and the University of Chicago's Economics Department (1999-2003).

    Professor Duggan's research focuses primarily on the effect of government expenditure programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the behavior of individuals and firms. Some of his more recent research is exploring the effect of federal disability programs on the labor market and of changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs on the cost and quality of health care. He is also estimating the effect of patent reforms in India on the price and utilization of pharmaceutical treatments. His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been featured in outlets such as The Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

    Professor Duggan was the 2010 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, which is awarded every two years by the American Society of Health Economists to the economist aged 40 and under in the U.S. who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics. Along with his co-author Fiona Scott Morton, he received the National Institute for Health Care Management's 2011 Health Care Research Award for their work on Medicare Part D. He was a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 2004 to 2006 and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2006 to 2007. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Social Security Administration, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Duggan served from 2009 to 2010 as the Senior Economist for Health Care Policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and has also been an Expert Witness for the U.S. Department of Justice.

  • Rob Dunbar

    Rob Dunbar

    W.M. Keck Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOcean processes, biogeochemistry, climatology/paleoclimatology, isotopic chemistry, ocean policy

  • Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of Political Science

    BioProfessor Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) Professor Dupuy is by courtesy a Professor of Political Science.

    In his book The Mechanization of the Mind, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explains how the founders of cybernetics laid the foundations not only for cognitive science, but also artificial intelligence, and foreshadowed the development of chaos theory, complexity theory, and other scientific and philosophical breakthroughs.

  • William Durham

    William Durham

    Bing Professor in Human Biology, Emeritus

    BioWilliam (Bill) Durham is Bing Professor in Human Biology (Emeritus), Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow (Emeritus) in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. He has been jointly appointed in Human Biology and Anthropology at Stanford since 1977, when he came from the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Bill was an undergraduate Biology major at Stanford, Class of 1971, and received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award at graduation for his contribution to undergraduate education via the NSF-funded Student Air Pollution Research Project, the first student initiative nationally to receive NSF funding.

    Bill’s career has focused on two main themes: (1) putting principles of evolution to work in efforts to sustain the biological and cultural diversity of our world; and (2) identifying social dimensions of environmental problems in Latin America and working with local leaders to help solve them. He has carried out fieldwork in Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador (especially Galápagos) in South America, and in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica in Central America. In 1983, he was one of the first scholars to receive the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and has also received five five awards for research and teaching at Stanford, including one by vote of the students. Bill’s recent book, Exuberant Life: An Evolutionary Approach to Conservation in Galápagos (Oxford University Press, 2021) was named a Finalist for the 2022 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers.

    Bill’s other publications include the books Scarcity and Survival in Central America (Stanford Press 1979; and in Spanish, by UCA Editores 1988), Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford Press, 1991), The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America (U. of Michigan Press, 1995, with M. Painter), Inbreeding, Incest and the Incest Taboo (Stanford Press 2004, with A. Wolf), and Ecotourism and Conservation in the Americas (CABI, 2008, with A. Stronza). In addition, he served as Editor in Chief for 16 volumes of the Annual Review of Anthropology between 1992 and 2008.

    Bill was Founding Co-Director of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), a research organization that views tourism as a means to promote local livelihoods and environmental conservation. Along with Stanford Professors Rodolfo Dirzo and Larry Crowder, Bill has been Co-director of the Osa-Golfito Initiative (INOGO) in the Woods Institute, working with Costa Ricans to develop a sustainability strategy for the southern region of the country.

    He has led more than 35 Stanford Alumni Association trips to Galápagos, Costa Rica, the Amazon, East Africa, and elsewhere.

  • David Eagleman

    David Eagleman

    Adjunct Professor, Psych/Public Mental Health & Population Sciences

    BioDavid Eagleman is a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and Guggenheim Fellow. Dr. Eagleman’s areas of research include sensory substitution, time perception, vision, and synesthesia. He also studies the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system, and in that capacity he directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law. Eagleman is the writer and presenter of The Brain, an Emmy-nominated television series on PBS and BBC. He is the author of 8 books, including Livewired, The Runaway Species, The Brain, Incognito, and Wednesday is Indigo Blue. He is also the author of a widely adopted textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Brain and Behavior. His internationally bestselling book of literary fiction, SUM, has been translated into 32 languages, turned into two operas, and named a Best Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble. Dr. Eagleman has been a TED speaker, a guest on the Colbert Report, and profiled in the New Yorker magazine. He has launched several neuroscience companies from his research, including Neosensory and BrainCheck.

  • Paulla Ebron

    Paulla Ebron

    Associate Professor of Anthropology

    BioPaulla Ebron joined the department in 1992. Ebron is the author of Performing Africa, a work based on her research in The Gambia that traces the significance of West African praise-singers in transnational encounters. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialogue about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled, "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands."

  • Penelope Eckert

    Penelope Eckert

    Albert Ray Lang Professor, Emerita

    BioThe goal of my research is to understand the social meaning of linguistic variation. In order to do this, I pursue my sociolinguistic work in the context of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and social practice.

    Gender has been the big misunderstood in studies of sociolinguistic variation - in spite of the fact that some of the most exciting intellectual developments over the past decades have been in theories of gender and sexuality ... so I have been spending a good deal of time working on language and gender as well.

    Since adolescents and preadolescents are the movers and shakers in linguistic change, I concentrate on this age group, and much of my research takes place in schools. The institutional research site has made me think a good deal about learning and education, but particularly about the construction of adolescence in American society.

  • Dan Edelstein

    Dan Edelstein

    William H. Bonsall Professor of French and Professor, by courtesy, of History and of Political Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research lies in the fields of intellectual history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). I recently published a book that explores the history of rights from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolutions; I'm currently working on a book that explores the intellectual history of revolution; I have a number of papers on Rousseau's political thought underway; and I continue to work on a number of DH projects.

  • Paul N. Edwards

    Paul N. Edwards

    Senior Lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society

    BioI'm Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. I also co-direct the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative with Prof. Steve Luby.

    I'm Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan, where I worked for almost 20 years in the School of Information, the Dept. of History, and the STS Program. I taught previously at Stanford from 1992-1998 in various capacities, mainly in the Science, Technology & Society Program that I now direct.

    I study the history, politics, and culture of information infrastructures, especially climate knowledge systems. My books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001, co-edited with Clark Miller). I'm academic editor of the MIT Press book series Infrastructures.

    From 2018-2021, I served as one of 234 Lead Authors for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I (Physical Sciences), released in August 2021.

  • Ronald Egan

    Ronald Egan

    Stanford W. Ascherman, M.D. Professor

    BioResearch Areas:
    - Chinese Poetry
    - Song dynasty Poetry and literati Culture
    - The social and historical context of Song dynasty aesthetics

  • Karen Eggleston

    Karen Eggleston

    Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHealth reform in China; comparative healthcare systems in Asia; government and market roles in the health sector; payment incentives; healthcare productivity; and economic implications of demographic change.

  • Johannes C. Eichstaedt

    Johannes C. Eichstaedt

    Assistant Professor (Research) of Psychology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWell-being: affect, life satisfaction, and purpose, and their individual and societal determinants (lifestyle factors and policies); traits: character strengths, personality, trust, and empathy

    Mental and physical health: depression, stress, and anxiety; health psychology: heart disease and opioid addiction

    Methods: Natural Language Processing & Large Language Models; data science and
    visualization; longitudinal methods, machine learning, and psychological assessment through AI

  • Keith Ekiss

    Keith Ekiss

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPoetry, Translation, Speculative Literature.

  • Harry Elam

    Harry Elam

    Senior Vice Provost for Education, Vice President for the Arts, Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities, Emeritus

    BioVice Provost for Undergraduate Education; Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education; Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities and the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.

    He is author of and editor of seven books, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co‑editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as journals in Israel, Taiwan and Poland and several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is also the former editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006. In August 2006 he won the Betty Jean Jones Outstanding Teaching Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society and in November 2006 he won the Distinguished Scholar Award form the American Society of Theatre Research. In July 2014, Elam received the Association of Theatre in Higher education’s highest award for theatre scholars, the Career Achievement Award.

    In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for over twenty years: most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto California, he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleague, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson's plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter of which won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards.

    At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards: The ASSU Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Small Classes (1992); the Humanities and Sciences Deans Distinguished Teaching Award (1993); the Black Community Service Center Outstanding Teacher Award (1994), The Bing Teaching Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching (1994-1997); The Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1998).

    He received his AB from Harvard College in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Dramatic Arts from the University of California Berkeley in 1984.

  • Ameneh Shervin Emami

    Ameneh Shervin Emami

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioShervin Emami is Persian Language and Literature Lecturer in the Stanford Language Center. She is completing her dissertation, titled “Persian Contemporary Magical Realism through the Lens of Allegorical and Mystical Writings in Persian Classical Literature,” at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her M.A. in Middle Eastern History from California State University-Fullerton, and her M.A. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from UCLA. Before arriving at Stanford, she taught at UCLA, University of California-Irvine, and University of California-Berkeley.

  • Donald Emmerson

    Donald Emmerson

    Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSoutheast Asia; ASEAN; Indonesia; China; regionalism; Islamism; democracy; governance; U.S. foreign policy; and the sociology of scholarly knowledge

  • Saadet Ebru Ergul

    Saadet Ebru Ergul

    Lecturer

    BioSaadet Ebru Ergul serves as the Special Language Program Coordinator at the Stanford University Language Center, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate Turkish courses. She earned a B.A. from Bilkent University, an M.B.A. from Başkent University, and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics (with an additional focus on French) from Texas Tech University. Ebru is a writing proficiency rater (WPT) and oral proficiency tester (OPI) for the Turkish Language and takes part in various academic, non-academic projects as a Turkish language expert. Her research interests include oral proficiency assessment, teaching Turkish through interculturality and social justice, curriculum development, and national language standards for Turkish. She is also the co-author of a Turkish language textbook 'Konuşan Paragraflar'. Currently, she is serving as the president of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages (AATT). She loves figure skating and psychedelic Anatolian rock music.

  • Amir Eshel

    Amir Eshel

    Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature
    On Leave from 09/01/2023 To 08/31/2024

    BioAmir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

    Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

    Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

    Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

    Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

  • John Evans

    John Evans

    Lecturer

    BioJohn W. Evans is the author of The Fight Journal (Rattle, forthcoming 2023), winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014).

    His books have won prizes including the the Rattle Chapbook Prize, the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish was selected by Poets and Writers magazine as a “new and noteworthy” title of January/February 2017, and is published in the American Lives Series.

    His work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review (2016 Editor’s Prize Finalist), Poets & Writers, Slate, Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Flyfish Journal, Pangyrus, and Best American Essays 2011 (Honorable Mention), as well as the chapbooks, No Season (FWQ, 2011) and Zugzwang (RockSaw, 2009).

    John is currently the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. At Stanford, John has been recognized as a “favorite professor” by the women’s basketball, water polo, and volleyball teams, as well as the Knight Fellows and the DCI Fellows. He lives in Northern California with his three young sons.

  • Marcus Feldman

    Marcus Feldman

    Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman genetic and cultural evolution, mathematical biology, demography of China

  • Anne Fernald

    Anne Fernald

    Josephine Knotts Knowles Professor of Human Biology, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWorking with English- and Spanish-learning children from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, our research examines the importance of early language experience in supporting language development. We are deeply involved in community-based research in San Jose, designing an innovative parent-engagement program for low-resource Latino families with young children. We are also conducting field studies of beliefs about child development and caregiver-child interaction in rural villages in Senegal. A central goal of this translational research is to help parents understand their vital role in facilitating children’s language and cognitive growth.

  • Paula Findlen

    Paula Findlen

    Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian

    BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.

    My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.

    Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand.

  • Thomas Fingar

    Thomas Fingar

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsChinese domestic and foreign policy, US-China relations, US foreign policy, intelligence analysis, mega-trends and global challenges, geopolitical consequences of climate change

  • Chelsea Finn

    Chelsea Finn

    Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering
    On Partial Leave from 04/01/2024 To 06/30/2024

    BioChelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and the William George and Ida Mary Hoover Faculty Fellow. Professor Finn's research interests lie in the ability to enable robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. Her work lies at the intersection of machine learning and robotic control, including topics such as end-to-end learning of visual perception and robotic manipulation skills, deep reinforcement learning of general skills from autonomously collected experience, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast learning of new concepts and behaviors. Professor Finn received her Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, an NSF graduate fellowship, a Facebook fellowship, the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across three universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.

    Website: https://ai.stanford.edu/~cbfinn

  • James Fishkin

    James Fishkin

    Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science

    BioJames S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab.

    He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.

    He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009), Deliberation Day (Yale 2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991).

    He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® – a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. His work on deliberative democracy has stimulated more than 100 Deliberative Polls in 28 countries around the world. It has been used to help governments and policy makers make important decisions in Texas, China, Mongolia, Japan, Macau, South Korea, Bulgaria, Brazil, Uganda and other countries around the world.

    He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  • Shelley Fisher Fishkin

    Shelley Fisher Fishkin

    Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
    On Leave from 04/01/2024 To 06/30/2024

    BioShelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, where she is also Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays and reviews, many of which have focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. Her books have won awards from Choice, Library Journal, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Before coming to Stanford in 2003, she was chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. In 2017 she was awarded the John S. Tuckey Lifetime Achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies in recognition of her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." Her most recent book, Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, came out in 2017. Junot Díaz called it "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States."
    She has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America, was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She has given keynote talks at conferences in Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kunming, Kyoto, La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S.
    In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world." In 2023 the American Studies Association awarded Fishkin the "Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to the field of American Studies." Her current book projects include a book entitled "Jim (Huckleberry Finn's Comrade)" forthcoming in Yale University Press's "Black Lives" biography series, and a book about Hal Holbrook and Mark Twain.

  • Sean Follmer

    Sean Follmer

    Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Computer Interaction, Haptics, Robotics, Human Centered Design

  • Charlotte Fonrobert

    Charlotte Fonrobert

    Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
    On Leave from 09/01/2023 To 08/31/2024

    BioCharlotte Elisheva Fonrobert specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to GrecoRoman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender(2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.

  • Alice Fox

    Alice Fox

    Lecturer, Science, Technology and Society

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsInterplay of video games and society, ethics, and philosophy of technology

  • Michael Frank

    Michael Frank

    Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology and Professor, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHow do we learn to communicate using language? I study children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world. I use behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods like large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras.

  • Estelle Freedman

    Estelle Freedman

    Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI continue to work on the history sexual violence, including the use of oral history testimony. I am currently co-producing an historical documentary film "Singing for Justice: Faith Petric and the Folk Process."

  • David Freyberg

    David Freyberg

    Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy students and I study sediment and water balances in aging reservoirs, collaborative governance of transnational fresh waters, the design of centralized and decentralized wastewater collection, treatment, and reuse systems in urban areas, and hydrologic ecosystem services in urban areas and in systems for which sediment production, transport, and deposition have significant consequences.