School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 31-40 of 45 Results
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Alexander Nemerov
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of English
BioA distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. Revered for his breadth of scholarship and celebrated for his eloquent public speaking, Nemerov inspires audiences with his belief in the affirming and transfiguring force of art.
An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. His conjuring of a lost world of shade and sun has been praised by Annie Proulx ("deeply beautiful”, “astonishingly tender”, “one of the richest books ever to come my way") and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”).
Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor, was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov’s initial books include Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus; The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824; and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.
Nemerov, an engaging, eloquent speaker, gave the 2007 Andrew Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2017, he delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, becoming the first scholar to deliver them with a focus on American art. He has also published two exhibition catalogues: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, the companion to a National Museum of American Art exhibition of that name and Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic.
After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors. -
Miguel Novelo Cruz
Lecturer, Art & Art History
BioMiguel Novelo (he/him/el) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic video art, technoshammanic installations, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computational virus-like software.
Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. -
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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Adam Tobin
Senior Lecturer of Art and Art History
BioAdam Tobin is a screenwriter teaching courses in short and feature film writing, TV pilots, script analysis, fiction film production, and adaptation. He created the half-hour comedy series About a Girl and the reality series Best Friend's Date for Viacom's The-N network (now TeenNick), won an Emmy Award for Discovery Channel’s Cash Cab, and has written for ABC, ESPN, and the National Basketball Association. He was a story analyst for Jim Henson Pictures and has taught story and pitching seminars at Dreamworks Animation, Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios, and Aardman Animations. He also teaches in the Arts Intensive program and offers an Improvisationally Speaking course in Stanford Continuing Studies.
His play She Persisted: The Musical, was a New York Times Critic's Pick and winner of the Off-Broadway Alliance award for Best Family Show. His new musical The Pigeon Gets a Big Time Holiday Extavaganza, co-written with and based on the characters of Mo Willems, bestselling author of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the Elephant & Piggie books, will open in six cities in November 2025. -
Nancy de Wit
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art, Emerita
BioNancy J. Troy is Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art and Chair of the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University. In addition to The De Stijl Environment (MIT Press, 1983), she is the author of Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (Yale University Press, 1991), Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion(MIT Press, 2003), and, most recently, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian(University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this book about Mondrian after his death in 1944, Troy examines the trajectories of the artist's work and legacy as they circulated through the realms of elite and popular culture, and she explores the ways in which the dominant historical narrative of Mondrian and his work has been shaped by art-market forces.
Professor Troy received her PhD from Yale University in 1979, and thereafter taught at The Johns Hopkins University (1979-83), Northwestern University (1983-93), and the University of Southern California (1994-2010). A past president of the National Committee for the History of Art, she was Editor-in-Chief of the flagship art history journal, The Art Bulletin, from 1994 to 1997. She has been awarded many fellowships, most notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
At Stanford, Professor Troy teaches courses on modern European and American art, architecture and design; cubism; modern art and fashion; art, business and the law; the art market, and topics generated by the collections and exhibitions of the Cantor Arts Center and the Art and Architecture Library. -
Fred Turner
Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Art and Art History and of History
BioFred Turner’s research and teaching focus on media technology and cultural change. He is especially interested in the ways that emerging media have helped shape American life since World War II.
Turner is the author of five books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory; Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); and L'Usage de l'Art: de Burning Man à Facebook, art, technologie et management dans la Silicon Valley. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries. They are available here: fredturner.stanford.edu/essays/.
Turner’s research has received a number of academic awards and has been featured in publications ranging from Science and the New York Times to Ten Zen Monkeys. It has also been widely translated.
Turner is also the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a freelance journalist for ten years and he continues to write for newspapers and magazines in America and Europe, including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.
