School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 201-262 of 262 Results
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Michael Senko
Ph.D. Student in Linguistics, admitted Autumn 2025
BioStarting in Fall 2025, I am a first year PhD student in the Stanford Department of Linguistics. My research is supported by an EDGE Doctoral Fellowship from the Stanford Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education.
I received a B.S./M.A. in Linguistics & Communication Studies from Northwestern University in 2022, where I worked with Rob Voigt and Annette D’Onofrio. Prior to starting my PhD, I worked as a teacher first in Taiwan through the Fulbright program and later in New York City. I have taught everything from TEFL and math to computer science and religion.
I’m broadly interested in how social and linguistic information is integrated. I use sociophonetic and computational methods in my research to shed light on the cognitive dynamics underlying language users’ utilization and perception of variation. My previous work has focused on variation in the uptake of new (pro)nominal forms on Twitter and in the stressed vowel of "Chicago." -
Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
Stanford Stdnt Employee-Summer, History DepartmentBioSerena is a PhD candidate in History in the United States field. She is in her fifth year and she works on the history of ideas in the nineteenth century, especially Americans' ideas about antiquity. Her dissertation investigates the history of oriental scholarship in the United States. It examines Americans' post-Civil War investment in pre-classical antiquity, and the 3,000-4,000 year-old history of the Bronze Age Orient (the site of the most ancient "Eastern" civilizations, or the modern Middle East). 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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Jie Shen 沈劼
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2021
BioJie Shen 沈劼 is a Ph.D. student in Chinese Archaeology, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. She mainly focuses on the crafting technology of bone artifacts in ancient China. Using the use-wear analysis, residue analysis, and experimental archaeology, Jie explores the variation and development of bone crafting techniques, and how the crafting industry was involved in social progress such as the formation of the early state. Also, she is interested in the religious and political meaning of animal-related artifacts, which are significant for understanding the human-animal relationship.
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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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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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Dillon Stone
Ph.D. Student in English, admitted Autumn 2026
BioInterested in (black) literary post-secularism: questions of unorthodox faith, ethics, and time at the boundaries of literary criticism, continental philosophy, and political theology.
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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. -
Chukwudubem Ukaigwe
Master of Fine Arts Student, Art Practice
HIA Grad Mentor, Stanford Arts InstituteBioChukwudubem Ukaigwe is an artist, curator, and writer based out of Canada. Exercising material as an experimental device for cross-examining plural themes, his interdisciplinary practice is an inquiry into semiotic dissonance. Chukwudubem participates in the creation of immersive audiovisual scapes for fecund contemplation, bringing to centre facets of everyday life to generate active conceptual trans-media interconnections pertaining to global aesthetics.
Tapping into a diverse spectrum of influences - from experimental music and literature, to history and futurisms - Ukaigwe approaches his art practice as a double gesture. On one hand, his work is a way of annotating, augmenting, defacing, transposing, and rewriting in the margins of a palimpsestic history. On the other hand, his paintings, installations, and video works are an attempt to assemble and compose a speculative sensorium that permits hearing in a different tempo; one that collapses the subject-object divide and maps out both new and revised sociographies. A compositional practice that is fabulated out of the choice to meander in extant modes of being: fugitive, improvised, ongoing and otherwise.
His social practice is established on the foundations of splintered or shared authorship, community input, fracturing time, and relativity. On obtaining a BFA (Hons.) from the university of Manitoba in Canada, Chukwudubem has presented exhibitions and effectuated artist residencies locally and intercontinentally. Ukaigwe is a founding member of the curatorial force, Patterns collective. -
Calvin Van Zytveld
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
BioCalvin Van Zytveld is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology who is also pursuing a Doctoral Certificate in Composition. His research focuses on sound recording and music notation. He is working on a dissertation titled 'Fixing Music: the Remediation of Sound and Performance through Notation and Recording 1958-2028,' which explores the means and motivations for fixing and affixing sounds past or future, real or fantastical. It includes chapters on text scores, microphone arrays, dynamic compression, and the pre-history of the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Calvin went blind suddenly and unexpectedly in 2020 due to Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON).
He is the Head Designer for BLIND ENVY, a project based at Stanford’s Center for Computer-based Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) to make the first-ever non-visual digital devices for recording and editing audio. BLIND ENVY is a 2026 recipient of the Magic Grant from the Brown Institute.
An avid cellist, he has given solo and chamber music performances in Canada, Sweden, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, and China and played with such musicians and ensembles as Gustavo Dudamel, Robert Spano, Ludovic Morlot, Per Tengstrand, the Richardson Chamber Players, and the English Concert.
His compositions have been performed by Ensemble Mosaik, Plymouth Chamber Players, NEKO3, Distractfold, Peninsula Women’s Chorus, Grand Rapids Choir of Men and Boys, Princeton University Orchestra, and the Princeton Camerata.
He co-directs and performs in two festivals in his hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 2016, Plymouth Chamber Players offers classical chamber concerts free of charge and features members of the Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Grand Rapids symphony orchestras. Across town, 2026 was the inaugural year of Fountain Fest. The festival stretched across four days and included punk rock, rave, stand-up comedy, film screenings, live-coded choir and organ, jazz, free improvisation, and guided meditation.
Calvin graduated summa cum laude in music from Princeton University, where he studied with Steven Mackey and Donnacha Dennehy. He pursued master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, studying composition with Bright Sheng and cello with Richard Aaron.
Recent awards and fellowships include the 2025 Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2026 New Music USA Creator Fund, the RAISE fellowship for community-based research, and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF). -
Dejan Vasic
Ph.D. Student in Art History, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Theater and Performance StudiesBioDejan Vasić is an art historian and curator of late modern and contemporary art and moving image media. He specializes in the transnational avant-garde and conceptual art, concentrating primarily on performance, video art, photography, and artists’ films and media works. His research intersects art, power, war, and everyday life, with methodological grounding in historical materialism, memory politics, decolonial, gender and feminist theory, and affirmation of critical thinking as a public good. Dejan is passionate about the history of exhibitions, museology and curatorial practice; he is invested in writings in the first person, and frequently collaborates with artists who battle social, economic and political problems.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Vasić had over a decade of experience in Serbia and the Yugoslav region, where he engaged in radical curatorial practices and critical writing that delves into the politics and ethics of aesthetics. Since 2012, he is a member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA and has served on the Program Advisory Board of AICA-Serbia (2020-2023). Dejan curated visual arts program at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade (2017-2023), co-edited the Beton - Cultural Propaganda Kit (2018-2023), was part of the Four Faces of Omarska Working Group (2010-2015), the Culture of Memory curatorial platform (2010-2014) and Kontekst Collective (2009-2013). -
RJ Vasquez
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2025
BioRJ Vasquez (he/him) is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on the history of American religions and gives particular attention to spiritual life, migration, labor, and the modern state. He is especially interested in spiritual life as a medium of historical agency.
Raised in California’s Central Valley, RJ earned an associate’s degree at Bakersfield College and a bachelor’s degree at California State University, Bakersfield. He completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard University before beginning his doctoral studies at Stanford.
RJ is also interested in digital humanities and directs a museum and archive revitalization project in his hometown of Wasco, California, where he works to add diversity and accessibility to his community’s shared history. -
Matías Walker
Ph.D. Student in Philosophy, admitted Autumn 2026
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI'm interested in making contributions on both the metaphysical and logical fronts of philosophical questions. My doctoral project will combine tools from modal logic, model theory, higher-order semantics and formal metaphysics, with particular attention to the relationship between logical structure and its semantical reach in metaphysical interpretation.
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Zach Wallis
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2026
BioI am a graduate student in the Department of History's doctoral program since 2026. My research focuses on political economy, environment, and energy in Australia, New Zealand, and the Southwest Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have previously undertaken research on Australian and New Zealand intellectual history in the same period, and published an article on James Bonwick's writing about the Aboriginal Tasmanians, titled "History, Extinction, Ambiguity," in the journal History Australia. I hold a first-class honours undergraduate degree in history from McGill University and master’s degrees in history from the Australian National University and the University of Chicago.
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Xinyu Wang
Master of Arts Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2026
BioGrad student CCRMA
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Katherine Whatley
Ph.D. Student in Japanese, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research examines the relationship between the written and the spoken word in Classical Japan. I take this relationship as the starting place and explore the role of music in Classical Japan through looking at words-as-song. From this vantage point, I argue that music was a primary mode of communication amongst people (especially women) and their surroundings—interpersonal, international, and inter-environmental. I am also a composer and koto performer working on a dissertation composition.
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Pelin Çılgın
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
Ph.D. Minor, Art HistoryBioPelin Çılgın is a film critic/curator from Istanbul and a PhD researcher at Stanford University. They currently curate films for several international and local NGOs and organizations with a focus on queer, genre, and East Asian works. Their academic research areas include East Asian film and media, the horror genre, film curation, and queer feminist readings. Alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Talents Sarajevo, among others. Voting member of the European Film Academy.
