School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 21-30 of 60 Results
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Gabrielle Hecht
Professor of History
BioGabrielle Hecht is Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Anthropology. She is President of the Society for the History of Technology, and 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 the so-called "energy transition," 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's a finalist for 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/ 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 Modern Thought and Literature. 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. -
David Hills
Associate Professor (Teaching) of Philosophy
BioI did my undergraduate work at Amherst and went on to graduate school at Princeton. Since then I've taught at Harvard, UCLA, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of Michigan, Berkeley, and Stanford. I resumed my graduate career a little while back -- from a distance, as it were -- receiving the PhD in 2005.
I'm married to another philosopher, Krista Lawlor.
My interests continue to center in aesthetics, but they have spilled over into pretty much every branch of philosophy at one time or another.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 34: Im Rennen der Philosophie gewinnt, wer am langsamsten laufen kann. Oder: der, der das Ziel zuletzt erreicht. (In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest — the one who crosses the finish line last.) I'm not sure I believe this, but it's a comforting thing to read. -
Hector Hoyos
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioHéctor Hoyos is a scholar of modern Latin American and comparative literature. He writes about ideological critiques of globalization in the post-1989 Latin American novel, the articulation of critical theory and new materialism in the region’s cultural production, and related topics. His current monograph in progress examines the works of Gabriel García Márquez from a law and humanities perspective.
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Tomás R. Jiménez
Professor of Sociology
BioTomás Jiménez is a Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the founding co-director of Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies. His research and writing focus on immigration, policy, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation Press) (with Deborah Schildkraut, Yuen Ho, and John Dovidio) uses survey data (with an embedded experiment) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, US-born Latinos, and US-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico. The American Sociological Association’s Population Section selected the book for its Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished Book Award. His second book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents). His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity(University of California Press, 2010), draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, Social Currents, Qualitative Sociology, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
Professor Jiménez also conducts research with Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, including projects examining naturalization, refugee resettlement, and health and language access.
In other lines of research, Professor Jiménez and Sofia Avila (Princeton sociology) examine how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2007. This research employs hand-coding and computer-assisted text analysis of the textbook sample.
Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He was the Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2017-19). He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of US Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center and the Migration Policy Institute. He has written editorials on immigration in several major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He has also offered commentary for media outlets, including NBC News, National Public Radio, and Univision. -
Gavin Jones
Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities
BioGavin Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (U of California, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton, 2007), Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge 2021). He has published articles on writers such as George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville, in journals including American Literary History, New England Quarterly, and African American Review. Jones has edited a new version of a neglected classic of American literature, Sylvester Judd's "transcendental novel," Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845). He is also co-editing a much needed Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, and is beginning a new project titled The Secret History of the Short Story.
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Roanne Kantor
Assistant Professor of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsGlobal Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. The conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially literature's relationship with medicine and the social sciences.
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Elizabeth Kessler
Advanced Lecturer
BioElizabeth Kessler’s research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century American visual culture. Her diverse interests include: the role of aesthetics, visual culture, and media in modern and contemporary science, especially astronomy; the interchange between technology and ways of seeing and representing; the history of photography; and the representation of fashion in different media. Her first book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, on the aesthetics of deep space images, was published in 2012. She’s currently writing on book on extraterrestrial time capsules, as well as developing a new project on fashion photography.
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Matthew Kohrman
Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioMatthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.
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Marci Kwon
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
BioMarci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the Cantor Art Center's Asian American Art Initiative. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton, 2021), and co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné. She is the recipient of Stanford’s Asian American Teaching Prize, CCSRE Teaching Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Women's Faculty Forum Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, and the Mellon Foundation Emerging Faculty Leader award.
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Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.
Professor Landy has appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "Philosophy Talk" (on narrative selfhood and on the function of fiction) and has on various occasions been a guest host of Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty).
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.