School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 61-77 of 77 Results
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Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
Workshop Coordinator, History DepartmentBioSerena is a PhD candidate in History in the United States field. She is in her fourth year and she works on the history of ideas in the nineteenth century: particularly, how Americans thought about the ancient past as they entered modernity. Her dissertation explores late 19th-century interest in civilizational collapse and the Eastern Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age. She is also currently writing a research article on Greek and Roman slave-naming practices and the classicism of American slavery.
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Adele Leigh Stock
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2020
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHistory of environment, religion, and technology in 20c urban Africa
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Merve Tekgürler
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2019
Masters Student in Symbolic Systems, admitted Autumn 2023BioMerve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.
Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.
As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.
Merve’s research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI in Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World, which they started with Adrien Zakar in Winter 2020. They also contributed to their advisor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Mapping Ottoman Epirus project, building a placenames dataset from an Ottoman transportation map and developing a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with exaggerated elevation data.
Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop (AY 2021-22 & 2022-23). They also worked as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA from Spring 2021 to Fall 2022. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects. -
Vannessa Velez
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2017
BioVannessa Velez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University. Her research broadly examines the environmental impact of globalization on urban centers, with particular attention to environmental inequality. Her dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro-Atlanta’s rapid economic development in the second half of the twentieth century, when the city’s leaders embraced globalization both early and enthusiastically to great economic success, at the expense of the city’s built and natural environment.
Vannessa is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the Norall Award, and the Stanford Humanities Center Dissertation Prize. She is currently working on several projects, including a digital humanities project dedicated to research methods in Black Studies, an article on black environmental politics in the 1980s, and a co-authored article on race, globalization, and the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta.
