School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 101-120 of 130 Results

  • Jun Uchida

    Jun Uchida

    Professor of History

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current book project examines the diasporic history of Ōmi shōnin (merchant). Often compared to overseas Chinese and Jewish merchants, merchants of Ōmi (present-day Shiga prefecture) are famous for peddling textiles and other goods across the early modern Japanese archipelago. My aim is to trace their activities into the global age of capital and empire, from cotton trade and manufacturing in China to retail commerce in Korea and Manchuria, and immigration to North America.

  • Richard Vinograd

    Richard Vinograd

    Christensen Professor of Asian Art

    BioRichard Vinograd is the Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1989. Dr. Vinograd’s research interests include Chinese portraiture, landscape painting and cultural geography, urban cultural spaces, painting aesthetics and theory, art historiography, and inter-media studies. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); co-editor of New Understandings of Ming and Qing Painting (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy Painting Publishing House, 1994); and co-author of Chinese Art & Culture (New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 2001). He has published more than thirty journal articles, anthology chapters, conference papers, and catalogue essays on topics ranging from tenth-century landscape painting to contemporary transnational arts.

  • Peter Vitousek

    Peter Vitousek

    Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resource Studies, Professor of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsVitousek's research interests include: evaluating the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and how they are altered by human activity; understanding how the interaction of land and culture contributed to the sustainability of Hawaiian (and other Pacific) agriculture and society before European contact; and working to make fertilizer applications more efficient and less environmentally damaging (especially in rapidly growing economies)

  • Barbara L. Voss

    Barbara L. Voss

    Professor of Anthropology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a historical archaeologist who studies the dynamics and outcomes of transnational cultural encounters: How did diverse groups of people, who previously had little knowledge of each other, navigate the challenges and opportunities of abrupt and sustained interactions caused by colonialism, conflict, and migration? I approach this question through fine-grained, site-specific investigations coupled with broad-scale comparative and collaborative research programs.

  • Ban Wang

    Ban Wang

    William Haas Professor of Chinese Studies

    BioWilliam Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University
    Departments of East Asian Languages and Comparative Literature
    Yangtze River Chair Professor, Simian Institute of Advanced Study,
    East China Normal University

  • Barry R. Weingast

    Barry R. Weingast

    Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    BioBarry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair, Department of Political Science, from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics.

  • Karen Wigen

    Karen Wigen

    Frances and Charles Field Professor of History

    BioKären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography at Stanford. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano.

    An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis, and to co-direct the "Oceans Connect" project at Duke University. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest project is another collaboration, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps, with co-editors Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas ( University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016).

  • Mikael Wolfe

    Mikael Wolfe

    Associate Professor of History

    BioI am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.

    I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America and the United States, climate ethics, and water history (see teaching tab to the right. I am accepting graduate students to work under me, but before contacting me, please become familiar with my work. Specific questions engaging with my work and how it relates to your own research interests are more fruitful as a basis for conversation than generally asking to learn more about my work.)

    My first book, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (Duke, 2017; winner, 2018 Elinor K. Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History; short-listed, 2018 María Elena Martínez Prize for Mexican History), investigates how people managed their water—via dams, canals, and groundwater pumps—in a great crucible of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, the arid north-central Laguna region. In so doing, it demonstrates how Mexican federal engineers were not merely passive implementers of large-scale state development schemes such as agrarian reform. Instead, to implement the latter, they actively mediated knowledge between state and society, identifying what they thought was technologically possible and predicting its environmental consequences.

    The book also explains how engineers encountered an intrinsic tension between farmers’ insatiable demand for water and the urgency to conserve it. By closely examining how the Mexican state watered one of the world’s most extensive agrarian reforms, the book tackles an urgent question in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexican state formation, Latin American environmental history and history of technology, and global development studies: how and why do governments persistently deploy invasive technologies for development even when they know those technologies are ecologically unsustainable?

    To answer this global question, my book integrates environmental and technological history along with social, economic, political, and legal analyses based on extensive research in archival sources, journals, newspapers, and government publications in Mexico and the United States. Using this “envirotechnical” analytical framework, the book uncovers the varied motivations behind the Mexican government’s decision to use invasive and damaging technologies despite knowing they were unsustainable.

    My research on agrarian reform and water management in north central Mexico led me to investigate how weather shapes the process of social revolution across Cuba’s varied climates and environments. In my new book project, Rebellious Climates: How Extreme Weather Shaped the Cuban Revolutions, I combine environmental history and historical climatology to argue that extreme weather events such as drought and hurricanes were not merely infrequent external shocks to Cuba, quickly entering and exiting the main anthropocentric stage of its theater of revolution. Instead, these events were long enmeshed in Cuban politics, economics, society, and culture, and thereby shaped the origins and progression of the 1959 revolution in ways largely overlooked by historians.

  • Christine Min Wotipka

    Christine Min Wotipka

    Associate Professor (Teaching) of Education and, by courtesy, of Sociology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCross-national, comparative, and longitudinal analyses of leadership and higher education with a focus on gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

  • Xiaoze Xie

    Xiaoze Xie

    Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art

    BioXiaoze Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has had solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Dallas Visual Art Center, TX; Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Gent, Belgium; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing; Gaain Gallery, Seoul; Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX; among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York and Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the traveling exhibition Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US. His 2004 solo at Charles Cowles was reviewed in “The New York Times”, “Art in America” and "Art Asia Pacific". More recent shows have been reviewed in “Chicago Tribune”, “The Globe and Mail” and “San Francisco Chronicle”. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Xie received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003) and artist awards from Phoenix Art Museum (1999) and Dallas Museum of Art (1996). Xie is the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University.

  • Sylvia Yanagisako

    Sylvia Yanagisako

    Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Emerita

    BioSylvia Yanagisako is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Emerita. From 2023-2026 she will be Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research and publications have focused on the cultural dynamics of kinship, gender, work and capitalism. She has also written about the orthodox configuration of the discipline of anthropology in the U.S.

    Professor Yanagisako’s latest book, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: a Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion (Duke University Press, 2019), co-authored with Lisa Rofel, analyzes the transnational business relations forged by Italian and Chinese textile and garment manufacturers . This book builds on her monograph (Producing Culture and Capital (Princeton University Press), which examines the cultural processes through which a technologically-advanced, Italian manufacturing industry was produced. Professor Yanagisako is currently conducting research on sea level rise, seashore management and family legacies in Hawai’i.

  • Yinyu Ye

    Yinyu Ye

    Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research interests include Continuous and Discrete Optimization, Algorithm Development and Analyses, Algorithmic Game/Market Theory and Mechanism-Design, Markov Decision Process and Reinforcement Learning, Dynamic/Online Optimization and Resource Allocation, and Stochastic and Robust Decision Making. These areas have been the unique and core disciplines of MS&E, and extended to new application areas in AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, and Business Analytics.

  • Lee Yearley

    Lee Yearley

    Walter Y. Evans-Wentz Professor of Oriental Philosophies, Religions and Ethics

    BioLee Yearley works in comparative religious ethics and poetics, focusing on materials from China and the West. He is the author of The Ideas of Newman: Christianity and Human Religiosity and Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (recently translated into Chinese), as well as numerous journal articles and essays in edited volumes.

    Professor Yearley holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.