School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 61-80 of 80 Results
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Serena Shah
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2021
BioSerena 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 examines the history of oriental scholarship in the United States. It explores Americans' post-Civil War investment in pre-classical antiquity and the Eastern Mediterranean, Bronze Age world that they called the Orient. 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
SHI Discussion Leader, Stanford Pre-Collegiate StudiesCurrent 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
Master of Arts Student in History, admitted Spring 2025BioVannessa is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history with an interest in racial capitalism, science and technology studies, and urban environmental inequality. Her dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro Atlanta’s rapid economic development from the beginning of national urban renewal in 1949 to 1996 when the city cemented its status as a global hub after hosting the Centennial Olympics. In particular, she focuses on how Atlanta’s early and enthusiastic embrace of globalization and new urban planning and engineering trends led to great economic success and widespread celebration as the new "Black Mecca" for African American business and culture. Unfortunately, this progress came at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable communities and their local environments—the consequences of which Atlanta is struggling to overcome today.
Her research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Stanford Humanities Center, the Eisenhower Institute, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the MIT SHASS Fellowship program, and the University of Pennsylvania's Provost Predoctoral Fellowship program.
