School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 201-300 of 335 Results
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Mercedes Montemayor Elosua
Doctor of Musical Arts Student, Musical Arts
BioMercedes Montemayor (b. Monterrey, Mexico, 1997) is a young composer with a great talent for creating innovative and avant-garde music. Her passion for music began at an early age, and since then, she has been immersed in the world of composition and music production. Her musical influences are diverse, and she enjoys experimenting with different genres, from classical music to ambient and electronic music. One of her greatest influences is Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose compositions have been a constant source of inspiration for Mercedes.
Despite her short career, Mercedes Montemayor has managed to stand out in the world of experimental music thanks to her ability to create complex and immersive soundscapes. Her compositions are often introspective and emotive, reflecting her interest in exploring new forms of expression through music. In addition to her work as a composer, Mercedes is also a sound engineer, which has allowed her to have a more technical and precise approach to her music production.
Mercedes performed in Mutek Mexico in October 2023 and interned in WSDG, an architectural acousics firm. She will be starting her DMA in music composition at Stanford University starting Fall 2024. -
Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioAshkan Nazari
M.A. Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran
A Kurdish-Iranian musician and researcher, Ashkan is currently an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford. He holds a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Tehran and a master's in ethnomusicology from Tehran University of Art.
Ashkan's more than 15-year-long research career has centred upon Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. The core area he is pursuing at Stanford covers the intersections between music, on the one hand, and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam and Kurdish identity, on the other. His interest also includes the development of ethnographic studies of the relationship existing between maqām as a cultural-musical concept, with ethnicity, racism and colonialism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with three titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music, the Anthropological Aspects of Maqām Music of Iraqi Kurdistan, with the latter set to be released soon. Many of his numerous articles have additionally appeared across prestigious Iranian journals, others presented at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first-ever philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan also taught Iranian music theory and Iranian ensembles, while instructing setār performance and analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively. -
Andrew Patrick Nelson
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2018
Ph.D. Minor, History
Ph.D. Minor, LinguisticsBioI am a PhD Candidate in the Japanese Linguistics track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. My research is motivated by two primary areas of inquiry: first, to what extent can methods in linguistic science be applied to historical documents to recover a speaker/writer intent and reader/listener interpretation? Second, in what ways are language changes perceived, categorized, and valorized; in what ways do those perceptions, categories, and values shape language ideology; and in what ways does language ideology in turn change language use? My work brings together methods in psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics in analyzing texts on language written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Japanese texts as a primary case study, but also leveraging sources in English, French, and German for a transnational perspective.
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Bertrand Ngong
Ph.D. Student in German Studies, admitted Autumn 2023
BioMy name is Bertrand C. Ngong. I am originally from Cameroon, a Central African country that still bears the scars of German colonial presence in linguistic, architectural, toponymic, cultural, political, and even memorial aspects to this day. Growing up, this dual African and German heritage became deeply ingrained in me, guiding my steps first toward Germanic studies and then towards African studies. My reflections aim to comprehend how these two legacies interconnect, mutually influence each other, and shape the present-day relations between the German-speaking cultural space and Africa. I am particularly interested in the cultural and intellectual productions of Black people in the German language and/or about Germany. Historically, I investigate the African sources of the historiography of German colonization in Black Africa. Moreover, I closely follow current German-African affairs, especially concerning issues of reparations, restitution of artworks, and repatriation of African remains stolen during German colonization in Black Africa. Lastly, my reflections also seek to challenge and decolonize a certain perception of Germanic studies that would limit this field exclusively to the borders of Germany and Germanic countries.
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Quyen Nguyen-Hoang
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2022
BioQuyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer and translator born in Hà Nội.
Her recent translations include the English translation of Chronicles of a Village, a novel by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện (Yale University Press 2024), and the Vietnamese translation of Samuel Caleb Wee’s poetry collection https://everything.is/ (AJAR Press 2024).
While a curator at Sàn Art, she wrote Masked Force (2022), a bilingual book of war photographs by Võ An Khánh. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Jacket2, Modern Poetry in Translation and other venues. -
Kaitlynn Norton
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Autumn 2023
Manuscript Asst, Special CollectionsBioKaitlynn Norton is an MA student in the field of Early Modern Europe. She earned her BA in History from UCLA, where she completed research on topics such as contemporary responses to witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and the social repercussions of the Black Death. Now her research focuses on court culture and etiquette in Medieval to Early Modern Britain.
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Samuel Page
Ph.D. Student in Slavic Languages and Literatures, admitted Autumn 2021
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEastern European literature; Eastern European religions; literary theory.
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Greg Priest
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2011
BioI am a PhD candidate (ABD) in History of Science at Stanford. I focus on the history and philosophy of biology and the historical sciences, with particular interests in Charles Darwin and in the sciences of complex systems.
Before coming to Stanford, I was a lawyer, serving as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and then representing Silicon Valley technology companies. I left the law for the software business, first as CFO of a publicly-traded software company, next as founding CEO of a software start-up, and finally as Chairman and CEO of a global, publicly-traded internet education company.
I did my undergraduate work at Princeton and got my law degree at Stanford. I also have a Masters of Liberal Arts from Stanford. I am married, have two children and one grandchild and am an avid hiker, skier, and cook. -
Nancy Rico-Mineros
Master of Arts Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2024
BioNancy Rico-Mineros is currently a first-year grad student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Prior to Stanford, Nancy attended NYU in which she received a Bachelor of Music in Music Technology.
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Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentBioSerena is a PhD candidate in History in the United States field. She is in her fourth year and she works on the history of ideas in the nineteenth century: particularly, how Americans thought about the ancient past as they entered modernity. Her dissertation explores late 19th-century interest in civilizational collapse and the Eastern Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age. She is also currently writing a research article on Greek and Roman slave-naming practices and the classicism of American slavery.
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Aatika Singh
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and EthnicityCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsCaste Studies, Art History & Cultural Studies, Race Studies and Modernism
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Matthew Steven Sosa
Master of Arts Student in Philosophy, admitted Autumn 2022
BioPhilosophy interests: philosophy of language, philosophy of action, metaphysics, philosophical logic, representation
Music interests: jazz improvisation, music theory -
Adele Leigh Stock
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHistory of environment, religion, and technology in 20c urban Africa
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Merve Tekgürler
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Masters Student in Symbolic Systems, admitted Autumn 2023BioMerve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.
Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.
As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Merve’s research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI in Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World, which they started with Adrien Zakar in Winter 2020. They also contributed to their advisor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Mapping Ottoman Epirus project, building a placenames dataset from an Ottoman transportation map and developing a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with exaggerated elevation data.
Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop (AY 2021-22 & 2022-23). They also worked as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA from Spring 2021 to Fall 2022. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects. -
Kedao Tong
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2018
BioKedao Tong is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religious Studies. His research focuses on the socio-cultural history of Chinese Buddhism and topics related to animals in the Chinese and the broader East Asian contexts. He is currently writing his dissertation, tentatively titled "Rescue the Buddha’s Animal Disciples: The Practice of Buddhist Animal Release in China," which explores the the history of animal release (fangsheng) in Chinese religions from the fifth to the early twentieth centuries.
Kedao received an MA in Chinese from Stanford University, where he wrote a thesis that studies the writing of women’s epitaphs from China’s Northern Dynasties (439-581 AD). Prior to coming to Stanford, he received an Honors BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. He has taken up coursework and language training in Hong Kong and Japan, and has a background in editorial work in academic and other settings.
