School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 301-400 of 453 Results
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Antonia Michelle Rosen Peacocke
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
BioAntonia Peacocke works on philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics, including philosophy of literature. As of December 2025, her monograph Mental Means is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Before coming to Stanford, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.
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Michael Penn
Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics
BioMichael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies, is a specialist in the history of early Christianity with a particular focus on middle eastern Christians who wrote in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac.
Professor Penn’s first book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning.
Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration that uses recent advances in the computerized analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of Syriac Christianity and the manuscripts they produced.
Before joining Stanford, Professor Penn was on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has additional experience as a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. Professor Penn has also held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA.
Ph.D. (Religion) Duke University (1999)
A.B. (Molecular Biology) Princeton University (1993) -
Bissera Pentcheva
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics
BioBissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics, phenomenology, and acoustics. Her most recent book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press 2017) explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. She has also edited, Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics and Ritual (Ashgate, 2017). Pentcheva has published another two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships among them: J. S Guggenheim, American Academy of Rome, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of Classical Arabic, Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Onassis Foundation (Greece), Dumbarton Oaks, and Columbia University's Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship. Her work has been published at the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Convivium.
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Peggy Phelan
Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts and Professor of English
BioPeggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005).
She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. She has written about Samuel Beckett for the PMLA and for The National Gallery of Ireland. She has also written about Robert Frost, Michael and Paris Jackson, Olran, Marina Abramovic, Dziga Vertov and a wide range of artists working in photography, dance, architecture, film, video, music, and poetry. She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President and Treasurer of Performance Studies International, the primary professional organization in her field. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She chaired the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and the Drama Department at Stanford University. -
Patrick Phillips
Eavan Boland Professor
BioPatrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of four poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Song of the Closing Doors, published in 2022. Phillips has received support from the Guggenheim Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and the Carnegie Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, and the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America. He is the Eavan Boland Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford.
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Paul Phillips
Professor (Teaching) of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHave recorded music by Adolphus Hailstork with Stanford Philharmonia, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, and guest artists for inclusion on a commercial recording with a projected completion date in 2025.
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Robert Podesva
Associate Professor of Linguistics
BioI am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. I hold degrees from Stanford University (PhD, MA) and Cornell University (BA) have been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. My research examines the social significance of variation in the domains of segmental phonetics, prosody, and voice quality. I have a particular interest in how phonetic resources participate in the construction of identity, most notably gender, sexuality, race, and their intersections. My latest projects focus on the social meaning of non-modal voice qualities in interactional contexts and sociolinguistic variation in inland California and Washington, DC. I have co-edited Research Methods in Linguistics (with Devyani Sharma), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (with Kathryn Cambpell-Kibler, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong), and a special issue of American Speech on sociophonetics and sexuality (with Penelope Eckert). I live in San Francisco.
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Steven Press
Associate Professor of History
BioSteven Press is an Associate Professor of History and an affiliated member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for African Studies, and the Stanford Center for Law and History.
Press' first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa (published Spring 2017 with Harvard University Press), received the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.
Press' second book, Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa, appeared in 2021 with Harvard University Press. It received the German Studies Association's Barclay Book Prize and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Title.
In an article in the Journal of Modern History, Press explored the exchanges between Germany, China, and Cuba that led to the USA's lease for Guantanamo Bay in 1903. His article on post-Napoleonic European nationalism appeared in Central European History, as did a more recent article about Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik.
Press graduated with a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt before coming to Stanford. His research interests include European sovereignty, international relations, and commodity networks. -
Robert N. Proctor
Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTobacco and cigarette design; human origins and evolution; changing concepts of health and disease; medical history and medical politics
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Sarah Prodan
Assistant Professor of French and Italian
BioI am an Italianist, an early modernist and a Michelangelo scholar. My primary research and teaching contributions center on Italian literature and cultural history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a special focus on lyric poetry and on the relationship between literature and spirituality.
My first monograph, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was awarded the Jeanne and Aldo Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies by the Modern Language Association in 2013. Literary, cultural and historical in scope, this study considers the Florentine artist’s poetics and aesthetics in light of medieval and Renaissance Augustinianism, lay religious culture, and the Italian Reformation, respectively, to provide a more nuanced understanding of Michelangelo’s spirituality and how it functioned.
My current book project, Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy, builds on this earlier work to consider the ways in which male and female poets of devotional verse engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth century. Combining diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of early modern Italian verse, this project examines relations among religious practice and poetic form in the pre-Tridentine and post-Tridentine periods.
Other book-length projects include Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts and Expressions (Toronto: CRRS, 2014), a co-edited volume that explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a well-ordered series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization: the courtly love tradition, Renaissance humanism; the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the attendant confessionalization and wars of religion; Jesuit missions; the colonization of America; and lastly, expanding trade patterns in the Age of Discovery.
Prior to joining Stanford, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University and at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where I designed and taught early modern cultural history courses and lectured on Italian language and literature.
In parallel to my scholarly pursuits, I am completing a work of historical fiction inspired by my academic research. Taking the dramatic events of the French invasion of Italy in the fall of 1494 as its context, Imminence: Florence, 1494 recounts the riveting and tumultuous history of the dangerously divided Florentine city-state through the experiences of a lay female visionary temporarily resident in an elite nunnery tied to the highest echelons of political power. An imagined female story seamlessly inserted into a famously documented male history, Imminence weaves strands of verisimilitude with threads of reality, to offer a tapestry of fiction and non-fiction that touches on persistent human challenges – personal, social, and political. An exercise in empathic historical imagination, this novel explores women’s political, social, cultural, and religious history during the exciting and pivotal moment of the Italian Renaissance.
You can learn more about my academic and creative pursuits at www.sarahprodan.com. -
Ato Quayson
Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn addition to an interest in comparative cultural traditions of tragedy, I also have a strong interest in comparative urban studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and interdisciplinarity, among others.
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Michael Ramsaur
Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEducation for Theatrical Lighting Design, nationally and internationally. Lighting design for Musicals.
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Vaughn Rasberry
Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
BioVaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, Race and the Totalitarian Century, questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, the defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.
His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English.
An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. -
Michael Rau
Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a live performance creator and director. I direct theater, musicals, opera, and I create digital media projects. I am always looking for new projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. I am interested in ways that technology can be used to tell stories, in virtual reality and games, and in live performance situations. I have created immersive theater pieces, and I enjoy working with new playwrights and writers to develop and shape their work.
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Rush Rehm
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and of Classics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStanford Repertory Theater (SRT) will present *Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond* at the Sebastopol Arts Center on November 7, 2021. The audio/visual version and/or the script is available for use by schools, arts councils, and environmental groups, free of charge, Contact stanfordrep@stanford.edu, or go to our website stanfordreptheater.com. Join the fight to save human and animal life on our planet!
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Rob Reich
McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Sr Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI, Professor, by courtesy, of Education, of Philosophy, of Law and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute
BioRob Reich is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology at Stanford University. In 2024-25, Rob was on public service leave as Senior Advisor to the United States Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
His scholarship in political theory engages with the work of social scientists and engineers. His newest work is on governance of frontier science and technology. His most recent books are System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, HarperCollins 2021) and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore, University of Chicago Press 2021). He has also written widely about philanthropy, including Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). His early work is focused on democracy and education, including Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has testified before Congress and written widely for the public, including for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. He was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review and at the Spencer Foundation. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and served as its inaugural board chair. -
James Reichert
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioJames Reichert is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. He has previously published In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (Stanford University Press, 2006). His forthcoming book, Literature for the Masses: Japanese Period Fiction, 1913-1941 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2025), explores popular adventure tales about premodern swordsmen. He has also written on prewar Japanese detective fiction, silent Japanese film, Edo-period books, Boys’ Love comics, and Japanese Romanticism.
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Joan Ramon Resina
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and of Comparative Literature
BioProfessor Resina has authored thirteen books, most recently Luchino Visconti. Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. The book focuses on the director’s German Trilogy —The Damned (1969) Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). This set of films is thematically unified through the exploration of decadence, combining a stunning aesthetic with philosophical implications. The book traces the philosophical themes, relating them to dominant currents of thought and sensibility in the periods under representation.
Resina is also the author of The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. This book is a reflection on the political use of historical memory focusing on the case of Spain. It analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origin and transmission of political violence and its endurance in the form of “negationism”. The book engages controversial issues, such as the relation between memory and imputation, the obstacles to reconciliation, and the problems arising from the existence of not only different but also conflicting memories about the past. Another book from the same year is Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles. Toronto University Press, 2017, which received the North American Catalan Society award for best book on Catalan Studies in 2019. This book condenses Pla's 47-volume work into 11 thematic units devoted to a central aspect of Pla's oeuvre. Resina explores the modalities of Pla's writing: stylistic, phenomenological, political, his relation to language, fiction, food, and landscape, and his approach to sexuality, women, and death. It introduces the reader to the colorful world of Catalonia's greatest 20th century prose writer through the author's gaze. Pla was a privileged observer of some of the crucial events of the 20th century, but he also captured the sensual infrastructure of his own country by recording every aspect of its reality.
Previous books include Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book, Resina lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies, contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions. Another publication since joining Stanford is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image since the late 19th century through the 20th century through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period.
Resina has edited thirteen collections of essays on varied topics, most recently, What to do with ruins? Contemporary uses of ruination. Liverpool University Press, 2025. He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, and Angelaki, and has contributed to a large number of critical volumes. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Editor of Diacritics. For many years he has been a regular contributor to the Barcelona daily press. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities, and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowships, and a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Cologne. He has been distinguished with the Cross of St. George, one of the highest awards bestowed by the Government of Catalonia. -
Judith Richardson
Senior Lecturer in English
BioJudith Richardson is a senior lecturer in English and associate director for the American Studies Program. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judith began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities. The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Jessica Riskin
Frances and Charles Field Professor of History
BioJessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at MIT before coming to Stanford, and has also taught at Iowa State University and at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation.
Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society. -
Lesley Robertson
Senior Lecturer of Music
BioAfter celebrating 34 years with the internationally celebrated St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ), Lesley Robertson (viola) continues to make her life at Stanford University where along with her St Lawrence colleagues she directs the chamber music at the Department of Music. Ms. Robertson teaches viola, coaches chamber music, and also spearheads the Emerging String Quartet Program at Stanford and the annual St Lawrence Chamber Music Seminar. A graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, Ms. Robertson also holds a degree from the University of British Columbia where she studied with her mentor, Gerald Stanick. A founding member of the SLSQ, Ms. Robertson toured regularly with the ensemble, performing 100+ concerts worldwide per season (in Berlin, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Toronto, among others) while also nurturing close ties to the Stanford community performing in various classes, dormitories, laboratories, hospitals, and in Stanford's glorious Bing Concert Hall. She participated in the Marlboro Festival for several years and and toured with Musicians from Marlboro before co-founding the SLSQ. She has served on the jury of several international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition and the Concours de Genève. Summer music festivals include Spoleto Festival USA, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Banff Festival, Festival of the Sound, Santa Fe Chamber Music, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Bravo Vail, Music@Menlo and more. Robertson plays on a viola (1992) made by fellow Canadian John Newton and a bow (2016) by Francois Malo.
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Aileen Robinson
Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAileen K. Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century British theatre and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.
Robinson's current book manuscript explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century science museums. She investigates how theatrical performances and magic shows drew upon technological innovations and formed unique methods for disseminating scientific knowledge. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production. -
Jesse Rodin
Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts
BioJesse Rodin strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the distant past. Immersing himself in original sources, he sings from choirbooks, memorizes melodies and their texts, and recreates performances held at weddings, liturgical ceremonies, and feasts. A passionate teacher, Rodin has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses at institutions such as Princeton University, the Schola Cantorum (Basel, Switzerland), the University of Vienna, and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France).
Rodin’s recent monograph "The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin" (Cambridge University Press, 2024) presents a theory of how fifteenth-century polyphonic music happens in time. Other published works include a volume in honor of Joshua Rifkin (2024), "The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music" (2015), a volume for the "New Josquin Edition" (2014), "Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel" (Oxford University Press, 2012), and articles that bring historiographical, analytical, evidentiary, practical, and embodied perspectives to a range of subjects. An in-progress co-edited book aims to clear the ground and offer a new path forward in Josquin studies.
As director of the vocal ensemble Cut Circle Rodin performs internationally. In partnership with the Belgian label Musique en Wallonie, Cut Circle recently embarked on a project to record the complete music of Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450/51–1521). The first album appeared in 2023; the second, titled "JOSQUIN: II. Motets milanais ; Missa L’ami Baudichon," is forthcoming in fall 2025. Other albums include a disc of anonymous fifteenth-century masses (2021) as well as double albums devoted to the complete songs of Johannes Okeghem (2020), the late masses of Guillaume Du Fay (2016), and music from the Sistine Chapel (2012). A short film titled "Sounds of Renaissance Florence" (2021) recaptures the soundscape of fifteenth-century Italy.
Two projects in the digital humanities strive to make the period as a whole more accessible. Rodin directs the "Josquin Research Project" (josquin.stanford.edu), a digital tool for exploring a large musical corpus. He co-directs "Mapping the Musical Renaissance," which facilitates basic understanding as well as serendipitous discovery.
Rodin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and the American Musicological Society. He has been featured in a variety of public forums, including The New Yorker. He prepares new editions of all the music Cut Circle performs; these are freely available through the Josquin Research Project. For his work with Cut Circle he has received the Prix Olivier Messiaen, the Noah Greenberg Award, Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), and a Diapason d’Or. Cut Circle’s latest album was a finalist for a Gramophone Award.
At Stanford Rodin directs the Facsimile Singers, in which students develop native fluency in old musical notation. He has organized symposia on the composer Johannes Okeghem, medieval music pedagogy, musical analysis in the digital age, and regional Italian cooking. -
Jonathan Rosa
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop frameworks for understanding ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first examines racial reckonings across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.
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Janice Ross
Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies, Emerita
BioJanice Ross, Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and former faculty director of ITALIC, Stanford's residence based Freshman arts immersion program, has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and Ph.D degrees from Stanford. Her research interests and books focus on the intersections of social issues and their expression through performance. They include, Like A Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale Univ. Press 2015), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press 2007),winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007), Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin Press 2001/ University of Florida Press, Second Edition/2020) and, co-edited with Susan Manning and Rebecca Schneider, The Futures of Dance Studies, (University of Michigan Press (2020). Her research interests concern performance and social justice with a particular focus on tensions between political and aesthetic expression. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross Cultural Perspective, (Routledge, 2017),The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2019) Soloists and The Modern Dance Canon (Univ. Press of Florida, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the 2016 CORD Award for Outstanding Contributions to Dance Research , an NYU Fellowship for the Center for Ballet and the Arts (2018) and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (Italy 2022). Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars.
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Daniela Rossell
Lecturer
BioDaniela Rossell was born and raised in Mexico City. She is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher who works solo and collaboratively in the fields of visual art and writing. Her first book, Ricas y Famosas, was described by historian Cuauhtémoc Medina as “among the most significant political works of the art of her country,” and by the New York Times as a “photographic journey through Mexico's twilight zone.” Solo exhibitions of Rossell’s work have been organized by Greene Naftali gallery in New York City, by Spruth Magers Projekte in Munich and by kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City (in collaboration with Galen Jackson and as part of Siembra). Her work has appeared in numerous books such as Witness to Her Art, Things with a History, An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values; in publications such as ArtForum, El País, Le Point, Der Tagesspiegel, The Guardian, Proceso, TvNovelas, Le Monde; and has been shown around the world in museums and cultural institutions such as MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, SF MOMA, Les Recontres d'Arles, Kunst-Werke Berlin, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes to name a few.
Professor Rossell will be joining Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History again for the 2025 Spring quarter. She will be teaching ARTSTUDI 242: Drawing and Creative Writing—a hands-on, interdisciplinary course that gives students both the tools to claim the complexity of their own stories and the opportunity to plunge into contemporary art from the double perspective of the visual and the verbal. -
Nancy Ruttenburg
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Emerita
BioNancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies. -
Gabriella Safran
Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioGabriella Safran has written on Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and French literatures and cultures. Her most recent monograph, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard, 2010), is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.
Safran teaches and writes on Russian literature, Yiddish literature, folklore, and folkloristics. She is now working on two monograph projects: one on how people in the Russian Empire listened across social lines, recorded and imitated others’ voices in various media, and reflected on listening and vocal imitation, from the 1830s to the 1880s, and the other on the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.
For more information about her activities and publications, see https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/gabriella-safran -
Jose David Saldivar
Leon Sloss, Jr. Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioJosé David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.
He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012),coeditor (with Monica Hanna and Jennifer Harford Vargas) of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016) coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).
Additionally, he has published numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Studies, American Literary History, The Americas Review, Revista Casa de las Américas, Daedalus, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Global South. He has served on the editorial boards of Duke University Press, the University of California Press, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals American Literary History, The Global South, Aztlan, and World Knowledges Otherwise. He has received personal research grants from The Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the William Rice Kimball Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (invitation for a future visit).
His teaching is divided evenly between graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and some of his undergraduate courses are cross-listed in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
In 2003, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Western Literature Association; in 2005, he received the Chicano Scholar of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association; in 2007 he received the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the University of California, Berkeley; and in 2016, he was the winner of the American Literature Society’s highest honor, the Jay B. Hubbell Medal. The medal is sponsored by the American Literature Society, an allied organization of the Modern Language Association, and is awarded annually to one “scholar whose lifetime of scholarly work has significantly advanced the study of American literature.” . Before coming to Stanford in January 2010, Saldívar was the Class of 1942 Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. -
Ramon Saldivar
Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of English, of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research is concerned with the relationships among race, form, genre, representing what Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently term the “post-postmodern.” In the latest version of this research presented at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin I use Sesshu Foster's "Atomik Aztex" as an example twenty-first century racial imaginaries. Part fantasy, part hallucinatory sur-realism, part muckraking novel in the grand realist protest tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), part historical novel in the mode of Vassily Grossman’s great Stalinist era masterpiece, Life & Fate (1980) set during the battle of Stalingrad, part ethnographic history about religious, military, and social structure of the pre-Columbian Aztec (Nahua, Mexica) world, part LA noir, and wholly Science Fiction alternative and counterfactual history, it exemplifies many of the criteria of the “post-postmodern.” Moreover, in addition to this range of formal matters, Atomik Aztex is concerned with two other topics:
•a reconceptualization of the way that race affects the formations of history, and
•the reshaping of the form of the novel in order to represent that reconceptualization.
With eighty-two characters populating the story, itself a plotted compendium of at least two radically separate yet intertwined universes of action, in a continually shifting movement from past, present, and future times, Atomik Aztex is a radical experiment in novelistic form. Using the tools of quantitative formalism developed for literary use by the Stanford University Literary Lab, I wish to show how the work of the computational humanities, in conjunction with traditional hermeneutic methods of literary analysis can help us understand the radical turn of contemporary American fiction toward speculative realism. -
Stephen Sano
Professor Harold C. Schmidt Director in Choral Studies and Professor (Teaching) of Music
BioStephen M. Sano, Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Music, assumed the position of Director of Choral Studies in 1993. At Stanford, Dr. Sano directs the Stanford Chamber Chorale and Symphonic Chorus, where he has been described in the press as “a gifted conductor,” and his work as “Wonderful music making! ... evident in an intense engagement with his charges: the musicians responded to this attention with wide-eyed musical acuity.” Other reviews have lauded, “It is difficult to believe that any choral group anywhere is capable of performing better than the Stanford chorus under the direction of Stephen M. Sano.”
Dr. Sano has appeared as guest conductor with many of the world’s leading choral organizations, including in collaborative concerts with the Choirs of Trinity College and St John’s College, Cambridge; the Joyful Company of Singers (London); the Choir of Royal Holloway, University of London; the Kammerchor der Universität der Künste Berlin; and the Kammerchor der Universität Wien (Vienna). He often appears as guest conductor of the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra in its collaborative concerts with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus, and has served on the conducting faculty of the Wilkes University Encore Music Festival of Pennsylvania. He has studied at the Tanglewood Music Center and is in frequent demand as a master class teacher, conductor, and adjudicator in choral music. To date, he has taught master classes and conducted festival, honor, municipal, and collegiate choirs from over twenty states, as well as from England, Austria, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Japan.
On Stanford’s campus, Dr. Sano’s accomplishments as a leader and educator have been recognized through his appointments as the inaugural chair holder of the Professor Harold C. Schmidt Directorship of Choral Studies and as the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He was also the recipient of the 2005 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Dr. Sano's recordings with the Stanford Chamber Chorale have appeared three times on the Grammy Awards preliminary ballot in the category "Best Choral Album." His choral recordings can be heard on the ARSIS Audio, Pictoria, and Daniel Ho Creations labels.
Outside of the choral world, Dr. Sano is a scholar and performer of kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar), and an avid supporter of North American taiko (Japanese American drumming). As a slack key artist, his recordings have been nominated as finalists for the prestigious Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award and the Hawaiian Music Award. His recording, "Songs from the Taro Patch," was on the preliminary ballot for the 2008 Grammy Award. Dr. Sano’s slack key recordings can be heard on the Daniel Ho Creations and Ward Records labels.
A native of Palo Alto, California, Dr. Sano holds Master’s and Doctoral degrees in both orchestral and choral conducting from Stanford, and a Bachelor’s degree in piano performance and theory from San José State University. He has studied at Tanglewood Music Center and with Mitchell Sardou Klein, William Ramsey, Aiko Onishi, Alfred Kanwischer, Fernando Valenti, and Ozzie Kotani. -
Cintia Santana
Senior Lecturer of Comparative Literature
BioCintia Santana specializes in 19th and 20th Century Spanish literature, particularly in the cultural relationships between Spain and the United States. Her research interests include transatlantic and translation studies, representations of immigration in contemporary Spanish literature, and the theory and praxis of the Latin American and Spanish short story. Her book, Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975-1995), was published by Bucknell University Press in 2013. Her short stories, poems, and translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Santana's work was selected for the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Best New Poets 2020 and 2023, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a CantoMundo fellow and a recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artist Program fellowship. Her book of poetry, The Disordered Alphabet, is forthcoming from Four Way Books (Autumn 2023).
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Debra Satz
Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of H&S, The Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly Interestspolitical philosophy,ethics and economics, equality
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Walter Scheidel
Dickason Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History
BioPersonal website: http://www.walterscheidel.com
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Londa Schiebinger
John L. Hinds Professor of the History of Science
BioLonda Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender in science and technology. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.
Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the findings at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. In 2022, she prepared the background paper for the United Nations 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women’s priority theme, Innovation and Technological Change, and Education in the Digital Age for Achieving Gender Equality and The Empowerment of all Women and Girls. Since 2023, Gendered Innovations has been a member of the UNFPA Equity 2030 Alliance.
In 2011-2014, Schiebinger entered into major collaborations with the European Commission and the U.S. National Science Foundation to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Asia, and was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013 as Gendered Innovations: How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research. In 2018-2020, Schiebinger directed the European Commission Expert Group to produce Gendered Innovations 2: How Inclusive Analysis Contributes to Research and Innovation. Institutes for Gendered Innovations research opened in Soeul, South Korea, in 2015 and in Tokyo, Japan, in 2022.
Schiebinger’s work has been featured in Science: A Framework for Sex, Gender, and Diversity Analysis in Research: Funding Agencies Have Ample Room to Improve Their Policies (2022); Nature: Sex and Gender Analysis Improves Science and Engineering (2019); Nature: Design AI so that it's Fair (2018); Nature: Accounting for Sex and Gender Makes for Better Science (2020).
Her work in the eighteenth century investigates the circulation of knowledge in the Atlantic World. Her Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Her prize-winning Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World investigates women's indigenous knowledge of abortifacients and why this knowledge did not travel.
Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and the University of Valencia, Spain (2018); the Berlin Falling Walls Breakthrough Winner in Science & Innovation Management (2022). Her work has been translated into numerous languages. In 2022/23, she served as an advisor to the Berlin University Alliance. -
Elizabeth Schumann
Billie Bennett Achilles Director of Keyboard Programs and Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAs a concert pianist, I deeply value the rich traditions of classical music. My passion lies in blending this artistry with scientific insights from neuroscience to biomechanics. This isn't solely about music; it's about applying lessons about optimal practice and peak performance to life's broader canvas. Through my research, I strive to evolve musical training, paving the way for the next generation of dedicated and resilient performers.
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Cory Shain
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and, by courtesy, of Psychology
BioI lead the Laboratory for Computation & Language in Minds & Brains (CLiMB Lab). We try to figure out how our brains let us go so efficiently from sensation (e.g., speech, reading) to meaning, and we do this using a combination of neuroimaging, computer modeling, and behavioral experiments. See the lab website for details.
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Michael Shanks
Professor of Classics
BioProfessor at Stanford University, Michael Shanks is one of the most original and influential of contemporary archaeologists. He has been at the forefront of archaeological thought and practice since the 1980s, pioneering new ways of understanding and explaining, engaging with Graeco-Roman antiquity and European prehistory, mobilizing remains of the past all around us — instigating changes in archaeology and how we all work with remains of the past. A specialist in long-term perspectives on design and creativity, innovation and social change, he explores connections across the sciences, humanities, and arts in research collaborations and outreach through and beyond the academy, tapping more than $32m of funding over the last 25 years.
Current projects
MS is currently completing four long-running and interrelated projects.
Archaeological history — building scenarios.
Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity. With Gary Devore. A project concerned with how one might conceive of antiquity as a kind of archaeological prehistory, retold through speculative fabulation. Against conventional narrative is offered a model of ancient lifeworlds conveyed through 45 personae and scenarios. Estimated delivery end of 2026.
Archaeological sites — encountering location.
Against place: a border archaeology. Based on archaeological itineraries in the northern borders of England/Scotland, including prehistoric and Roman field research, this project explores border crossings, trespass and transgression in questioning the character of space and place, site and region. Estimated delivery 2027.
Archaeological praxis — performance design.
Theatre/Archaeology: performing remains. With Mike Pearson. This book sums up 30 years of collaboration with performance artist Mike Pearson. In five portfolios of case studies in performance design they set out a pragmatics and methodology of deep mapping contemporary antiquity and prehistory. Estimated delivery end of 2025.
Archaeological actuality — for the future.
Archaeologies of Nature in Art: from Landscape to Climate Breakdown. With Gabriella Giannachi. This project mobilizes an archaeology of arts practices, from prehistory to contemporary art, to offer action-oriented responses to climate change in a reframing of the concept of nature. Estimated delivery autumn 2025.
The following is part of his continuing exploration of Applied Archaeology — design foresight.
Project Athena: Innovation in and through Learning. With Aisin Corporation led by Kenji Suzuki and in collaboration with Kimihiko Iwamura. Developing learning community and competencies in creative pragmatics — designing and implementing a strategy of corporate culture change. Ongoing 2025 – 2026. -
Vered Karti Shemtov
Eva Chernov Lokey Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Language and Literature
BioVered Karti Shemtov teaches Hebrew and comparative literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Shemtov is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Dibur.
Her publications include Changing Rhythms: Towards a Theory of Prosody in Cultural Context (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012) and several co-edited volumes, including Spoken Word, Written Word: Rethinking the Representation of Speech in Literature (2015), 1948: History and Responsibility (2013), and Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space (2005). She is also the author of numerous articles, including “Limbotopia: The ‘New Present’ and the Literary Imagination” (Journal of Comparative Literature, 2018, with Elana Gomel); “A Sense of No Ending: Contemporary Literature and the Refusal to Write the Future” (Dibur Literary Journal, 2018, with Elana Gomel); and “Poetry and Dwelling: From Martin Heidegger to the Songbook of the Tent Revolution in Israel” (Prooftexts). Her scholarship also examines the works of Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, Michal Govrin, A. B. Yehoshua, and Zeruya Shalev. She is the author of the entry “Hebrew Poetry: 1781–2010” in the revised edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Her current research project focuses on the poetics of rage and the literary, philosophical, and political forms through which rage is expressed and transformed in poetry and narrative. -
Sandra Wright Shen
Lecturer
BioSteinway Artist Sandra Wright Shen has been described as “a classical pianist of the first order.” With her passion, musicality and inspiration, she aims to move hearts and uplift spirits through music.
Sandra has performed across 16 countries in over 600 concerts. Her appearances include prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Cultural Center, Monte Carlo Opera House, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Frankfurt Cultural Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, Taiwan National Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Hong Kong City Hall, and festivals including the Granada International Music Festival, Recontres Musicales de Chaon in France, Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI, Chelsea Music Festival, MasterWorks Festival and Steinway Society Concert Series.
She has been featured as guest artist with orchestras appearances around the world displaying a broad repertoire of 26 concertos. She served as Artist-in-Residence with the Charleston Symphony during the 2017–18 season. As a chamber musician, Sandra has performed with renowned artists including Vesselin Paraschkevov (former concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic), Brinton Smith (Houston Symphony), bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, and toured Asia with cellist Nina Kotova.
Sandra received first prize from several major international piano competitions, including First Prize at the 2012 France International Piano Competition, the 1997 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, the 1996 Mieczysław Munz Piano Competition, and the 1990 Taiwan National Piano Competition.
Her recordings include a debut CD featuring Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, both released by Taiwan’s Rolling Stone Music. Her latest album, Momentum, with cellist Miriam Smith, was released on Azica Records in 2022.
Sandra is a piano lecturer at the Stanford University and the piano chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division. She has served on the faculty of the Brevard Music Festival, Tanglewood BUTI Young Artists Piano Program, Masterworks Music Festival, Music@Tetauchi, and American Fine Arts Festival in Europe and others. Previous academic appointments include Southern Illinois University and frequent invitations as Distinguished Guest Faculty at Furman University. Her students have won top prizes in competitions such as the International Piano Competition of Orléans (France), Stockholm International Piano Competition, the Chopin Foundation, Young Arts and the MTAC competitions.
Sandra performed live for WCQS Radio in Asheville, filmed a four-part television series “The Movements of the Master Composers” for Hong Kong TV and "Inspiration From Above" for US Creation TV, and hosted a classical music program for Taiwan’s IC Broadcast Radio FM97.5. Mixing music and philanthropy, Sandra has given benefit concerts for disaster victims, foster children, firefighters, music education for underprivileged children and San Jose Chamber Series.
Born in Taiwan, Sandra earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in Piano Performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with legendary pianist Ann Schein. Her teachers also include Zalina Gurevich and Jörg Demus.
www.sandrashen.com -
stephanie sherriff
Lecturer
BioStephanie Sherriff is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer currently based in San Francisco, California. Their work with sound, video, and physical phenomena is ephemeral in nature and culminates as time-based installations and performances that deconstruct fragments of daily life through experimental processes. They received a BA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019. Their work has been featured both nationally and internationally at creative centers such as the Institute for Research Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), the Sfendoni Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), O. Festival, Gray Area, The Lab, Artists Television Access (ATA), and the Center for New Music (C4NM).
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Ory Shihor
Lecturer
BioOry Shihor is an internationally acclaimed pianist and educator, serving on the piano faculty at Stanford University as Lecturer in Piano. His students have won major international competitions—including the Walter W. Naumburg International Piano Competition, Montreal International Piano Competition, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, and the Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU International Piano Competition—and have gained admission to leading conservatories and universities such as Juilliard, Yale, and Curtis.
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, Mr. Shihor has been a frequent guest lecturer and master class teacher at major institutions worldwide, including the Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories, Seoul National University, National Taiwan Normal University, Northwestern University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Boston Conservatory, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Royal Northern College of Music.
Prior to joining Stanford, he served for over a decade as Professor of Piano Performance at the Colburn Conservatory, where he was also the founding dean of the Colburn Music Academy, a highly selective pre-college program for gifted young musicians. He is the co-founder of the Ory Shihor Institute, where he continues to teach advanced pianists and mentor the next generation of piano educators.
Mr. Shihor is a prizewinner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the Washington International Piano Competition, the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, and the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition. He is a Bösendorfer and Yamaha artist. -
Partha Pratim Shil
Assistant Professor of History
BioI am an historian of modern South Asia, specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century eastern India, with a developing research interest in the late eighteenth century. My work is located at the intersection of the fields of histories of state formation and labour history. I am particularly interested in the histories of government workers and how this labour history intrinsic to the state apparatus recasts our understanding of state formation.
I am currently working on the manuscript of my first book, provisionally entitled 'Sovereign Labour: Constables and Watchmen in the Making of the Modern State in India, c. 1860-1950'. This monograph is a study of police constables and village watchmen in Bengal from the promulgation of the Police Act in 1861 until the upheavals of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. It reframes the history of constables and village watchmen, usually represented as government functionaries, as the history of a distinctive form of labour.
The most important methodological innovation of this study is to bring methods from the historiography of labour in South Asia in conversation with the vast archive of the colonial police and to demonstrate how we can rewrite police history as labour history. Sovereign Labour charts the contours of the market of security labour in eastern India and locates the emergence of colonial police workforces within the rhythms of this labour market. It reveals the patterns in the history of constabulary recruitment; examines the implications of the conditions of police work for the nature of police power; delineates the internal segmentation within the world of police labour, and the defining role of caste in shaping modern policing apparatuses in colonial India; and brings out fresh evidence about the myriad modes of politics devised by police workers in this region. More broadly, my aim is to clear a conceptual ground for the study of forms of labour within the apparatuses of the modern state as well as demonstrate how the history of the labouring lives of government workers can provide a fresh entry point into the nature of the modern state in South Asia.
Before joining Stanford, I was a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. -
Gi-Wook Shin
William J. Perry Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsKorean democratization; Korean nationalism; U.S.-Korea relations; North Korean politics; reconciliation and cooperation in Northeast Asia; global talent; multiculturalism; inter-Korean relations
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Julius Smith
Professor of Music, Emeritus
BioSmith is a professor emeritus of music and (by courtesy) electrical engineering (Information Systems Lab) based at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Teaching and research pertain to music and audio applications of signal processing. Former software engineer at NeXT Computer, Inc., responsible for signal processing software pertaining to music and audio. For more, see https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/.
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Matthew Smith
Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies
BioMatthew Wilson Smith’s interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
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Kathryn Starkey
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of English, of History and of Comparative Literature
BioKathryn Starkey is Professor of German in the Department of German Studies and, by courtesy, Professor of English, History, and Comparative Literature. Her work focuses primarily on medieval German literature from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and her research topics encompass visuality and materiality, object/thing studies, manuscript illustration and transmission, language, performativity, and poetics. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Palermo (2011) and Freiburg im Breisgau (2013 and 2018).
Recent book publications (since 2012) include:
* Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art, 800-1600, edited with Jutta Eming (Berlin/New York, 2021).
* Animals in Text and Textile. Storytelling in the Medieval World, edited with Evelin Wetter. Riggisberger Berichte, Vol. 24 (Riggisberg, Switzerland, 2019).
* Sensory Reflections. Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, edited with Fiona Griffiths (Berlin/New York, 2018).
* Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegger Manuscript, edited and translated with Edith Wenzel, TEAMS series in bilingual medieval German texts (Kalamazoo, MI, 2016).
* A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin von Zerclaere’s “Welscher Gast” (Notre Dame, 2013).
* Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan, edited with Jutta Eming and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame, 2012).
Professor Starkey is the PI for the Global Medieval Sourcebook (https://sourcebook.stanford.edu/) for which she received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2018) as well as awards from the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies at Stanford (2016, 2017, 2018).
Her current research projects include a co-authored (with Fiona Griffiths) textbook for the Cambridge Medieval Textbook series on A History of Medieval Germany (900-1220).
Professor Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).
Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. -
Alice Staveley
Senior Lecturer of English
BioAlice Staveley teaches a range of courses on British modernism, contemporary British and Canadian fiction, and Virginia Woolf. She has won the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016-2017) and directs the Honors Program in English and the Digital Humanities Minor. She has taught in the Oxford tutorial system, the History and Literature concentration at Harvard University, and Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities Program (2001-2006). Research interests include: modernism; narratology; book and periodical history; women and the professions; feminist and cultural theory; and digital humanities. Her current book project examines Virginia Woolf's life as a publisher. Select publications include: Woolf’s short fictional feminist narratology; Woolf’s European reception; photography in Three Guineas; modernist marketing; and transnational archival feminisms. She co-founded and co-directs of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a critical digital archive of documents related to modernist publishing supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Roberta Bowman Denning Digital Fund for Humanities and Technologies. http://modernistarchives.com Recent digital humanities research involves quantitative analysis of modernist book-sales records.
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Ariel Stilerman
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
BioI study premodern Japan through its manuscripts, objects, and languages.
I advocate for a “maker mindset” in the humanities. My research is just as much about building and doing as about reading and writing. My courses involve hands-on experiences and are often co-taught with colleagues in Classics, English, Religion, History, Mechanical Engineering, or Physics.
My first book, Court Poetry and the Culture of Learning in Japan (Harvard, 2026), charts the transformation of the poetry of the imperial court into a shared language for military and priestly elites, lower-ranking warriors, and eventually urban merchants.
My second project, Meet the People Who Built Japan, investigates the emergence of a “culture of work” in early medieval manuscripts and artifacts.
I welcome inquiries from students interested in classical through early modern Japanese literature through the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as those pursuing transdisciplinary work through the program in Modern Thought and Literature, and grad makers in the humanities through Making and Creative Praxis.
More broadly, I am interested in how we engage with the world through our senses and skills, exploring fields such as the tea ceremony, psychoanalysis, woodworking, sailing, olfactory cultures, technology, and design. -
Meghan Sumner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
BioMeghan Sumner received her PhD in Linguistics at Stony Brook University. After completing her PhD, she was an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Psychology. She has been at Stanford University since 2007, where she is now an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Stanford Phonetics Lab, where she investigates variation and spoken language understanding.
Meghan’s research sits at the intersection of acoustic phonetics, language use and variation, social meaning, and cognitive psychology. She investigates attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension within and across individuals, groups, and languages, aiming to understand how different components of spoken language understanding work together. She and her students are testing the predictions of and hope to contribute to the development of a dynamic adaptive socially-anchored model of spoken language understanding. For the past twenty years, her work has focused on diverse talker and listener populations, drawing on variation to address issues in linguistics and psychology related to representation, asymmetries in memory, social effects in spoken language recognition, familiarity, experience, and categorization.
She is currently a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, working with public institutions and advocacy groups to apply language-based social science methods to increase protections for children living with domestic violence. -
Chao Sun
Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, by courtesy, of Linguistics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy primary research interest is in Chinese linguistics studying how linguistic forms and meanings vary systematically in different socio-cultural contexts in modern Chinese languages. My other works concern with morphosyntactic changes in the history of Chinese and pedagogical grammar in teaching Chinese as Second Language.
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C. Kwang Sung, MD, MS
Associate Professor of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery (OHNS) and, by courtesy, of Music
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsLaryngology
Otolaryngology
Professional voice
