School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-138 of 138 Results
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David Sengthay
Master of Arts Student in Public Policy, admitted Spring 2024
BioDavid Sengthay is a community and electoral organizer from Stockton, California, committed to building power in underrepresented communities and advancing civic engagement at the local level. His work focuses on making local government more transparent, inclusive, and accountable through voter outreach, digital advocacy, and public demonstrations.
He has managed electoral campaigns in Stockton, including a City Council race that mobilized over 5,000 households in low-income neighborhoods of color. He has organized demonstrations supporting public education, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigrant justice, and built youth coalitions focused on reproductive wellness and culturally responsive mental health services. As a youth organizer, David centers the leadership and lived experiences of queer, Southeast Asian, and BIPOC communities—communities to which he belongs and remains deeply accountable.
At Stanford University, David serves as Chair of the Undergraduate Senate and previously led the Appropriations Committee, overseeing the allocation of over $6 million in student group funding. He also serves as the Director's Fellow at the First-Generation and/or Low-Income Student Success Center and coordinates new student programming for incoming FLI undergraduates. Across these roles, he works to ensure that students historically excluded from institutional decision-making are represented and empowered.
David is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors (B.A.H.) in Urban Studies and a Master’s in Public Policy at Stanford University. Supported by Stanford’s VPUE Major Grant, he is conducting IRB-approved fieldwork in Stockton in partnership with Empowering Marginalized Asian Communities (EMAC). His honors thesis investigates restorative justice and the criminalization of Cambodian-American youth through a case study of Southeast Asian youth organizing. After graduation, David plans to return home to serve in local government—first as a Program Manager in Stockton’s Office of Economic Development, and eventually as an elected official. His long-term goal is to craft policy solutions that expand opportunity, counter disinformation, and restore trust between communities and the institutions meant to serve them. -
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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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. -
Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan
Ph.D. Student in Modern Thought and Literature, admitted Autumn 2023
Ph.D. Minor, Communication
Ph.D. Minor, Computer ScienceCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsMy interdisciplinary research examines digital media through the lens of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. I am primarily interested in investigating how we can leverage the power of media to reinvent and promote social equality. Specifically, my research focuses on digital games and their prosocial influence on 21st- century China.
