School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-150 of 271 Results
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Gabrielle Hecht
Professor of History
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. She is also Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in South Africa.
Hecht's current research explores the inside-out Earth and its wastes in order to reveal the hidden costs of energy waste, with research sites in the Arctic, the Andes, southern Africa, and west Africa. Her 2023 book, *Residual Governance: How South African Foretells Planetary Futures,* received two 2024 PROSE Awards (for Excellence in Social Science and for Government and Politics) from the Association of American Publishers. It aslo received the 2024 E. Ohnuki Tierney award in Historical Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2024 Best Book Award from the African Studies Association.
Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Power in the Anthropocene," "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She supervises dissertations in science and technology studies (STS), transnational history, and African studies. Her undergraduate course in "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age" was built in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA).
Hecht’s 2012 book *Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade* offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as *Uranium Africain, une histoire globale* (Le Seuil 2016). Her first book, *The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity* (1998/ 2nd ed 2009), explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology, and nuclear culture in reactor operations. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology, and has appeared in French as *Le rayonnement de la France: Énergie nucléaire et identité nationale après la seconde guerre mondiale* (2004/ 2nd ed. 2014).
Her affiliations at Stanford include the Center for African Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Center for Global Ethnography, the Program on Urban Studies, and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Before returning to Stanford in 2017, Hecht taught in the University of Michigan’s History department for 18 years, where she helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and served as associate director of UM’s African Studies Center.
Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT (1986). She’s been a visiting scholar in universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others. -
Allyson Hobbs
Associate Professor of History
BioAllyson Hobbs is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Stanford University. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She gave a TEDx talk at Stanford, she has appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and her work has been featured on cnn.com, slate.com, and in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.
Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won two prizes from the Organization of American Historians: the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history. A Chosen Exile has been featured on All Things Considered on National Public Radio, Book TV on C-SPAN, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, the Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International, the Madison Show on SiriusXM, and TV News One with Roland Martin. A Chosen Exile has been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a “Best Book of 2014” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a “Book of the Week” by the Times Higher Education in London. The Root named A Chosen Exile as one of the “Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014.” -
Theresa Iker
Lecturer
BioTheresa Iker specializes in modern American politics, gender, and culture. She received her Ph.D. in History and minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) from Stanford University in 2023, where she now serves as the Choi-Lam H&S Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching. She offers courses in the Department of History and the Stanford Introductory Studies Program.
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Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
BioPh.D., Stanford University
M.A., Stanford University
A.B., Bryn Mawr College
Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 20th and 21st century French-speaking Central and West Africa and the Atlantic world. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; gender and sexuality; racial thought and multiracial identities; urban history; citizenship. Jean-Baptiste is currently researching the history of women, slavery, and urban history in Haiti and the French-speaking Atlantic world. -
Burçak Keskin Kozat
Director of Finance & Operations, History Department
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Finance & Operations
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Nancy Kollmann
William H. Bonsall Professor of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOctober 2018: In 2017 I published a synthetic history -- "The Russian empire 1450-1801" (Oxford). I am working on images of Russia in early modern Europe, generally by eyewitness travelers but also in the scurrilous penny press. I'm exploring how the tropes of engraving culture shaped images, how knowledge of Russia was disseminated and what image of Russia literate Europeans received. Then I'll return to the law -- Catherine II's 1772 judicial reforms on the local level across the Empire.
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Emily Jane Levine
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research topics include a genealogy of academic concepts; the contemporary consequences of Germany and America’s divergent paths in knowledge organization; Jews and private philanthropy for scholarship; the historical tension between knowledge-for-its-own sake and applied knowledge; the global transfer of the kindergarten, mass schooling, and higher education; and the history and future of institutional innovation.
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Yoav Levinson-Sela
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2024
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentBioYoav is a History Ph.D. student specializing in Early Modern Europe. His research focuses on the relationship between the production of knowledge and the moral communities of knowers sustaining them, particularly in northern German protestant universities and throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. More broadly, he is interested in the history of knowledge, the social and cultural history of science, the history of education, and the history of the book.
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Mark Lewis
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor of Chinese Culture, Emeritus
BioMark Edward Lewis’s research deals with many aspects of Chinese civilization in the late pre-imperial, early imperial and middle periods (contemporary with the centuries in the West from classical Greece through the early Middle Ages), and with the problem of empire as a political and social form.
His first book, Sanctioned Violence in Early China, studies the emergence of the first Chinese empires by examining the changing forms of permitted violence—warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the units of social organization, and in the defining practices and attitudes of the ruling elites. It thus traces the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city-states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state governed by a supreme autocrat and his agents.
His second book, Writing and Authority in Early China covers the same period from a different angle. It traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, including divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, collective writings of philosophical traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. It shows how these writings in different ways served to form social groups, administer populations, control officials, invent new models of intellectual and political authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs become potent, almost magical, objects.
His third book, The Construction of Space in Early China, examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. It shows how each higher unit—culminating in the empire—claimed to incorporate and transcend the units of the preceding level, while in practice remaining divided and constrained by the survival of the lower units, whose structures and tensions they reproduced. A companion volume, The Flood Myths of Early China, shows how these early Chinese ideas about the constituent elements of an ordered, human space—along with the tensions and divisions therein—were elaborated and dramatized in a set of stories about the re-creation of a structured world from a watery chaos that had engulfed it.
In addition to these specialist monographs, Lewis has written the first three volumes of a six-volume survey of the entire history of imperial China: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, and China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. These volumes serve as introductions to the major periods of Chinese history for non-specialists, and as background readings to introductory surveys. In addition to recounting the major political events, they devote chapters to the most important aspects of the society of each period: geographic background, cities, rural society, kinship, religion, literature, and law.
He has published a new monograph, Honor and Shame in Early China, which traces evolving ideas about honor and shame in the Warring States and early empires in order to understand major developments in the social history of the period. It examines the transformation of elites and the emergence of new groups through scrutinizing differing claims to “honor” (and consequent re-definitions of what was “shameful”) entailed in claiming a public role without necessarily being a noble or an employee of the state. -
Martin Lewis
Senior Lecturer in History, Emeritus
BioMartin W. Lewis is a senior lecturer in international history at Stanford University. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Environmental Studies in 1979, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in geography in 1987. His dissertation, and first book, examined the interplay among economic development, environmental degradation, and cultural change in the highlands of northern Luzon in the Philippines. Subsequently, he turned his attention to issues of global geography, writing (with Karen Wigen) The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press, 1997). He is also the co-author of a world geography textbook, Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (Prentice Hall), and is the former associate editor of The Geographical Review. Martin W. Lewis taught at the George Washington University and then at Duke University, where he was co-director of the program in Comparative Area Studies, before coming to Stanford University in the fall of 2002. He writes on current events and issues of global geography and at GeoCurrents.info.
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Mengyao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2022
Friday Talk student liaison, Classics
Grad student worker, Classics
Research Assistant, History DepartmentBioI am broadly interested in the production of knowledge in ancient worlds, with a particular interest in the Greco-Roman and Chinese traditions. My curiosity is a comparative and genealogical one at root: by comparing different societies, I seek to grasp the historicity of intellectual practices and the ideas thus produced. Currently, my research interest focuses on astronomy and astrology in Ancient Greece and China.
While completing my B.A. in Classics at Sorbonne University, I investigated how the urban metamorphoses of Rome materialized the transformation of the political regime. My master's thesis at EHESS, "Statues pour les corps, livres pour les mots" : La vie (βἰος) et la rhétorique (λόγος) dans les Discours Sacrés, offers insight into the psychosomatic relations conceived by the Greeks. The inquiry breaks into two interdependent questions: the therapeutic usage of rhetorical practices and the unconventional representation of Asclepius in the Sacred Tales of Aristides.
Having one year of training in software engineering from Tsinghua University, I am also passionate about the potentials of digital humanities.